Gateways
by Bekkoni
Summary: Darkseid has succeeded in his quest to destroy the universe. But there is one hope left-Clark, Diana and Bruce fight their way across alternate universes to find the device that can reverse the end of the world. But it's a race against time...
1. Prologue

~Prologue~

Batman was thrown back against the wall of the Watchtower by a wind that tasted of Darkseid's acrid breath. Clark and Diana were somewhere in the smoke—god only knew where the others were.

Darkseid held the glowing cube aloft. There was a second hanging from his belt. Together they would unleash pure unadulterated darkness—Doomsday. Batman fought against the maelstrom. Clark was dangling from Darkseid's hand now, thrashing, but there was kryptonite shards spread across the floor, glowing deadly. Diana's bracelet's glimmered—she was lying on the floor—he couldn't tell if she was unconscious or…

Darkseid brought the second cube up.

Bruce fought.

Darkseid kicked him away like litter, breaking ribs, and brought the two cubes together.

Batman felt the air suck from his lungs and the light from the world and everything plunged into blackness.

He opened his eyes to light and the blurry figure of a thin man in a chair seated before him. He wasn't religious enough to wonder if it was heaven, but he did note that his ribs no longer hurt.

Also, Clark and Diana were seated on either side of him. He blinked and the figure solidified into Metron of the New Gods.

"Fancy you showing up at the end of the world," he said. Clark gave him a look. "Couldn't have thought to intervene sooner?"

"I did not think it would get so far as to _require _ my intervention," Metron intoned. "Only recently did I escape from the motherbox Darkseid had ensnared me in, and my powers were quite weak. I required regeneration."

"_Darkseid just killed the world!_" Bruce yelled. "Why are we even here?"

"Calm yourself," Metron said. "I have used my temporal powers to preserve the world for as long as I am able. There is a reverse device to the one currently in Darkseid's possession…though he has broken it into twelve fragments and scattered them across the dimensions."

"Well, perhaps you could go and get them," Clark said.

Metron shook his head. "It is taking all my power just to freeze this dimension. I cannot hold in for an infinite amount of time—the three of you must travel through the dimensions and put the device back together, before I lose my hold."

"Why us?" Diana asked. "Get Barda or Mr. Miracle—they know how to work motherboxes. You're endangering the world by using us."

"Not at all." Metron looked at them like he might small, annoying children. "You three are resonance points. Some form of you exists in all worlds where life is possible—enabling you to travel to them."

"There is no more time to waste," he continued, and brought three things from his pocket. The first, a flat black disc, he handed to Clark. "This will locate the twelve fragments and lock on to the dimension of each, but it cannot pinpoint it inside the dimension, only locate the vague area."

The second item, a motherbox of shining silver, he gave to Bruce. "This will take you to the dimension that the disk finds. With all luck, you shall arrive within the same city as the fragment."

The final item was small, almost the size of a locket. He handed it to Diana, and she saw that it was an hourglass. "This will tell you how long you have left for your quest. My powers would allow you a day or two per fragment."

Metron let go of the hourglass and turned back to face all three of them. "Any harm you should incur in a dimension should be erased when you enter the next. But death…not even I have dominion over her. Also, you have one chance in a dimension. There are no second tries."

He touched the disk in Clark's hands and it began to glow a startling crimson. The cube Bruce was holding vibrated and suddenly a gaping black maw opened underneath them and they were sucked through before they could speak another word.


	2. The First World

**A/N: I know everyone does a world like this, but I just couldn't resist. I promise the other 11 will be really original…**

**Reviews are always appreciated.**

~Chapter One~

Clark opened his eyes and found…Gotham. Looking quite un-destroyed, in fact. He was standing in something squishy that might have been a rotten banana peel. Yes, this was definitely Gotham. His costume was gone—replaced by civilian clothes. Bruce and Diana were the same.

Bruce was staring up into the skyline. "We're in the East End. About eleven minutes from the manor if we get a cab. And if something with a New Gods energy signature landed in Gotham, then this version of me will definitely know about it."

It was the best lead they had. Diana flagged down a taxi with a driver who gave them a second glance when they gave the address for Wayne Manor, but didn't ask questions.

When they got there Bruce paid the driver and keyed in the combination on the front gates. Then he turned to Clark and Diana. "I can't go up there like this."

"Why not?" Diana asked.

"Because I can't just walk up and go 'Oh yes, I'm identical to you, perhaps we could have a cup of tea while we discuss interdimensional travel?'."

"Here." Clark shucked off the jacket he was wearing and tossed it over. "Pull up the hood."

"That'll work for about ten seconds," Bruce sighed, but he did it anyway. It was the best they had. They started up the drive (five-eighths of a mile, according to Bruce), ducking behind the decorative fig trees when they got in view of the manor.

"Who's that?" Clark asked. Bruce peeked up over a rose bush and saw a dark-haired woman let herself into the house, with blond woman in tow.

"Which one?"

"The attractive one," Clark said. "The brunette."

"No clue. The blond girl looks a little familiar but I can't place her." Bruce frowned. Two strangers in Wayne Manor. This posed complications. "Let's go in through the balcony."

Diana grabbed him by the jacket and they flew up to the balcony. Bruce picked the lock and let them in. The layout was the same, but there were subtle differences—the bedspread was a deep dark purple, everything was a little more organized, and Clark noticed a pair of earrings on the dresser.

Someone grabbed him by the collar and slammed him against the wall. He heard Bruce hit someone, and Diana's bracelets clang. He tried to throw the person holding him down—and found that he couldn't.

Bruce spun around. The blond woman had Clark by the shoulders. The black-haired woman tried to hit him. She had a good kick. He jumped backward to avoid her and collided with Diana. They both fell. The black-haired woman grabbed him and pinned him to the ground.

"Who are you?" she growled. "How did you get in here?"

"I might ask you the same question," Bruce said, and threw her off of him.

A flash of red shot across the room from where Clark and the blond woman were fighting. Bruce looked over—two smoking holes in the wall.

"Clark!" he snapped, at the same time as the brunette said, "Clare!"

And together: "Idiot!"

They stopped and looked at each other. Clark and the blonde paused. The dark-haired woman brushed off her expensive jeans. "Why don't you all tell me where you came from?"

"Let me get this straight," Clark said for what must have been the third time. "Clare Kent, and Bria Wayne." He glanced at Bria and then looked down again.

"What's your problem?" she asked. They were down in the batcave, and she'd scanned for resonance frequency them to verify their alternate universe story.

"He thought you were attractive," Bruce said. "And with you being the alternate version of me, that makes it awkward."

"Ah," Bria said, still focused on the computer. She was practically glaring at it. "I can't find any traces of Apokaliptian technology in Gotham. And trust me, my sensors would pick that up."

"Damn it." Bruce wanted to kick the cube in his pocket. "Metron said it would set us down where we could find the fragments."

"Maybe it set you down where you could find the help you needed to find the fragment. You know, set you on the right path." Clare was perched on the steel examination table. She had shoulder-length hair that fell in wisps around her face. Bria had chopped her hair off in a practical pixie cut.

"We need to go up to the Watchtower," Bria said, and pushed herself back from the computer. "It's the only way I can scan the entire globe."

The Watchtower looked almost disconcertingly the same. When the four of them teleported up, they were nearly bowled over by a flash of red and yellow zipping past.

"Wendy!" Bria yelled. "No superspeed on the Watchtower!"

"Oh, leave her alone." Clare reached out and grabbed the blur by its collar. The Flash (wearing a sleeveless shirt with a lightning bolt and a very short red skirt) stopped and looked up sheepishly. "You're irritating Batwoman, Flash."

"Come on, can't a girl have any fun?" Wendy asked, then saw Clark, Bruce, and Diana standing behind Bria and Clare. "Hey, who're those guys."

"Visitors." Bria brushed past her. "Come on. We need to go to the monitor bay."

There were two men seated in the monitor bay, one wearing armor and the other winged. They turned around when the door opened. The armored man smiled. "Bria!"

Bria's eyes slid over to Diana before she responded. "Dane. We need to run a scan for Apokaliptian tech around the globe, specifically something with an energy signature close to a motherbox."

"Coming right up." Dane smiled as he keyed in the search request. A picture of the earth popped up—spinning as the search worked. Bria leaned over the keyboard to watch; Dane put his hand on hers.

Bruce looked at Clark, "We're not that obvious, are we?"

"Um." Clark said. Bruce glared at him.

"There." Bria pointed at the screen. "There's a matching energy signature in New York…S.T.A.R. Labs, in fact."

"Well let's go down there." Bruce was practically pacing the room. He kept looking at Dane and grinding his teeth together. Clark wondered if it was the fact of their universe's peril that was getting to him or just the weirdness of this situation. "I've broken into S.T.A.R. plenty of time. Go in and get it."

"Give me a minute to download a map of the place." Bria pressed her hand against a pad on the computer and downloaded the map into her gauntlet. "There. You need a mask as well."

"I can borrow one of yours," Diana said.

Bruce and Bria both looked at her. "You're not coming."

"What?"

"We know the place," Bruce said. "And face it, you two aren't the sneaky type. We'll be back before you know it."

With that, the two Bats turned and walked out of the monitor bay.

"Are you coming?" Bria asked over the comlink. Bruce was behind her, squeezing his way through the ventilation shaft. He hadn't thought to take off Clark's loaned jacket and now was cursing himself for the extra bulk. This dimension was throwing him off his game.

"Tight fit," Bruce snapped.

"Try fighting crime in high heels," Bria replied.

They got into S.T.A.R. without much issue—past the guards with their oversized rifles and visors, and Bruce overrode the biometric system in thirty seconds. Finally they got to the vault, and Bria keyed in the combination.

The first shard of the salvation machine sat glowing in a nest of velvet and foam. They both stood still for a moment, entranced by the sheer power that radiated from the shard of blue crystal. Then Bruce snatched it from the velvet and they made their escape.

Back at the Watchtower, no one looked particularly happy. Bruce gathered that it was rather uncomfortable having to sit in a room with a gender-swapped version of yourself.

"So we got it? We can go?" Clark asked. He held up the disk Metron had given him, and it was glowing. "Looks like this thing's already latched onto the next universe."

"Get to it," Bria said. "Don't waste any time."

"Thank you for all your help." Diana was by far the most polite of the three of them.

Bria shrugged. Bruce pulled the cube from his pocket and it started to vibrate in his hand. Right before the portal opened, he saw Bria lean over to Clark and say something he couldn't hear. Clark turned red. Bria smiled.

They all fell into the vortex of light. When Bruce blinked they were standing on a lonely street, in the dead of night. The buildings were all shining silver. From outside of the alleyway, Bruce could hear the sounds of a party.

"Metropolis," Clark confirmed, just as a figure in a cape sailed through the sky and stopped directly above them.


	3. Blood

~Chapter Two~

Bruce dropped the cube as he was dragged 10,000 feet into air. Metropolis spun beneath his feet. He gasped—he could barely breathe in the thin air, and there before him was _Superman_ whose eyes were glowing red with extremely lethal heat vision.

"I thought I told you to never step foot in my city again." Superman was practically growling.

"Yeah, bout that…" Brue looked down, wondering if he slipped out of the jacket Clark would see him and be able to catch him before he became sidewalk splatter. Metron had been thoughtful enough to leave him his belt, so maybe if he threw a grapple at the right time he could catch the tallest building and only break his arms.

Superman grabbed him by the collar and pulled him close. Scratch the lose-the-jacket option. "I warned you what would happen the next time you stepped foot in Metropolis."

Bruce tried to think of a retort but when he opened his mouth he realized that he really wasn't getting enough oxygen to speak.

"Hey!" Clark flew up and yanked Bruce out of Superman's hands.

"Who the hell are you?" Superman said. "This man is a murderer! If you're protecting him then you're an accomplice."

Superman flew at Clark, punching him across the face. They spiraled upward, exchanging blows. Bruce held onto Clark's arm and hoped that he didn't get dropped.

"Supergirl attacked Diana," Clark said in between blows. He kicked Superman in the chest.

Bruce nodded. By his estimate, they were over the 12,500 feet mark. His head was spinning and he was starting to see spots.

"Wait!" Clark said. "X-ray me."

Superman paused for a fraction of a second. "You're me. Right down to the DNA."

"I'm from an alternate universe," Clark said. "And so's he. But trust me, he's no murderer."

Superman pressed a button on his communicator. "Supergirl. Let the woman go, and get up here, we need to talk."

Bruce shook his head. Neither Clark nor Superman noticed. Bruce gasped, trying to get enough air to stop the world from spinning. He kicked Clark in the leg.

"What?" Clark asked, then saw him looking pale and said, "Oh! Right!"

Finally back on the ground, Bruce leaned against a wall while he got back the feeling in his legs and let Clark go over the inter-dimensional-Darkseid-reverse-mechanism story. Superman kept looking at him oddly.

"What is it?" Bruce finally asked. "What do I do in your universe that I'm not allowed inside your city?"

"Well…" Superman hesitated. Bruce stared him down. "The, uh, Batman of my world—I presume you're also Batman—disagrees with the rest of us. He has what he calls a two-strike policy. First time he catches someone he just breaks a couple bones and tosses them in jail. Second time, well, that's the last time they'll ever screw up. Ever."

"I see," Bruce said, darkly.

"We did pick something up with a New Gods-energy signature, around a month back…" Superman trailed off again. "In Gotham. But the deal is we don't go in, and he doesn't come out."

"So you can't help us," Bruce said.

"I'm sorry," Superman said. "But we can't. The most can do is teleport you into Gotham. From there, you're on your own."

"Bastard," Bruce muttered under his breath, just loud enough for Superman and Superman only to hear. "Fine. Send us in then. We don't have much time."

Superman put in the call to the Watchtower. Bruce blinked and when he opened his eyes again the shimmer had faded and they were standing in an alley in the East End. Somewhere a woman was screaming.

"This way." Bruce ran through the maze of alleys that he knew like the back of his hand, with Clark and Diana just barely managing to follow. They ended up in the middle of a mugging—the woman on the ground, nose bleeding with the thug standing over her—when a dark shape leapt down from the rooftop.

Batman knocked down the man with a single left hook and tossed the purse back to the woman. This was not Bruce's costume—the boots and gloves were silver-armored and there was a holster on his belt.

Before any of them could fathom what they were seeing, Batman pulled out the pistol and shot the man through the back of the head. Not even Clark could catch a bullet when it's target was two inches away.

The woman ran, still screaming. Batman stood above the body, calm and blood-spattered. Diana gasped and he turned to them. "Were you a part of this?"

He said it evenly, with less anger than Clark had ever seen in Bruce, but somehow it was ten times more chilling.

"You killed him," Bruce said.

"A no, then." Batman slipped the gun back into it's holster. "I suggest you clear out."

Bruce leapt at Batman. Clark grabbed him by the back of the shirt, stopping him, and whispered. "Bruce. We don't have time."

Bruse growled in response.

Batman's ears perked up at the name "Bruce" and he peered at the three of them. "Interesting. I have to tell you, I'm not a fan of alternate-dimension world-jumping."

"I'm not a fan of killing people," Bruce snarled.

Batman shrugged as if this were a non-issue. "Had to be done. I suppose you're here for something?"

"We're looking for a fragment of Apokaliptian technology." Diana stepped forward. "We were told by…someone else…that it landed here. We need it to save our universe from being destroyed. Have you registered anything?"

"I have it," Batman said.

"Great!" Clark exclaimed.

"But I'm keeping it," Batman continued. "I have use for it. It could become a free energy source for Gotham, and that could save thousands of lives, take thousands out of poverty."

"You'd be killing millions in our reality," Clark said.

"Your reality is not my concern." Batman's hand trailed towards his belt.

Bruce noticed it immediately. "You have it here."

Batman smiled, ghostly and cold. "Very good. Quite the little detective, aren't you?" When Bruce glared and didn't respond, he said. "Well, I'm nothing if not a fair man, so I'll give you a chance at least. You fight me. If you win, you get the crystal, if I win then I do. And if you try anything I'll detonate it."

"Fine." Bruce shifted into a fighting stance.

Batman looked at Clark and Diana. "You two. Metas. Back away."

"We're not—." Clark began.

"_Do it_." Bruce snapped.

They backed off. Batman took the first hit, a right hook from Bruce, but then he swept Bruce's feet out from under him. Bruce flipped over, knocking Batman across the face with his left foot, and that was where Clark lost track of the flurry of blows and beatings.

Suddenly there was a flash, a bang, and brick dust exploded from above. A bullet. Batman had pulled his pistol.

Bruce ducked, tried to hit Batman in the chest.

"You know what your problem is?" Batman asked. "You're soft. I bet _your_ Gotham is overrun with criminals in makeup and masks—in mine it's just the guys to stupid to quit." His eyes narrowed even further. "I killed one, the Joker, after he took a shot at Robin. Tell me you didn't let him kill yours."

Bruce froze. In a split second Clark watched his expression go from anger to pain to utter burning hatred, and then he jumped on Batman and broke his alter-ego's arm. The gun clattered to the pavement.

"So I've hit a nerve." Batman smiled through a bloody nose. He knew he was beat, but Bruce in any universe is not one to give up. "Did you at least kill the Joker after you lost one person? Or did your _mercy _ and your _morals_ let him murder some more."

Bruce hit him across the jaw so hard that Clark hurt just thinking about it. Diana reached towards the two, then thought better of it. "Bruce! Stop!" Bruce hit him again, and again. Fractured ribs, broken nose…Clark stepped forward. Bruce ignored him.

"Stop." Clark grabbed his arm. "He didn't do anything. Let's take the crystal and let's go. He's not worth fighting over—not when there are people _depending _on us back home." He stressed it with the hopes that Bruce would see reason and not try to kill him too.

Bruce went still. Clark let go of his hand. Bruce pulled Batman up by the cowl, took the crystal from his belt, and smashed the other man against the brick wall. Batman slumped to the ground, unconscious.

"You okay?" Diana asked.

"Fine." Bruce didn't look at her.

When he held the first and second crystals next to each other they fused into one shape—the corner of a cube.

"Two down," Bruce said, stiffly and flat. "Let's get out of this place."


	4. Third World

~Chapter Three~

They landed hard in the next reality. Bruce smacked into the sidewalk, Clark landed next to him, and Diana shrieked. Bruce leapt to his feet and saw that she was ankle-deep in the murky green Thames.

"This. Is. Disgusting." Diana leapt out of the river and shook off her week, muddy shoes.

"London?" Clark asked. "Why the heck are we in London?"

"No clue," Diana said. "Bruce? Do you know anyone in London?"

Bruce was staring across the street. Clark looked t him. Bruce walked so close to the edge of the river that he nearly fell in. He pointed to the other side. "Is that _me_ over there?"

Diana and Clark looked. A man in a white lab coat was running down a sidewalk, clutching a stack of six or seven books and trailing loose papers behind him. As he ran he yelled _sorry_ and _excuse me_ to all the people he was knocking over. And behind a pair of too-big glasses he was indeed Bruce Wayne.

"After him," Clark said. They started over the bridge, and nearly lost him when he leapt into a taxi. Diana grabbed another and shouted "After him!" which made the driver look at them like they were either crazy or part of some inane reality tv show.

The cab driver followed the other taxi all the way to Oxford, where the lab coat Bruce leapt from the taxi, tossed a handful of coins the driver's way, and ran into the Physics building. They followed, but were confronted with three branching hallways.

"Look!" Diana pointed to a little sign on the wall, listing the main professors. The chair of the physics department was listed as Dr. Bruce Wayne, with an arrow pointed to the left. They all stopped for a split second to process that, before turning the corner, a bit apprehensively now.

At the end of the hall the door was open, light spilling out. Clark pushed it open just a fraction. Dr. Bruce was tearing the drawers out of the desk, desperately tossing papers out.

"Excuse me, Dr. Wayne?" Clark said.

Dr. Bruce didn't even look up. "I'm sorry, I'm late for a meeting, your question will have to wait for my office hours." He had a thick British accent.

"It's not so much a question as an emergency," Diana said.

"Yeah, well this is one too." Dr. Bruce finally found the paper he was looking for and straightened up. He threw the cup of pencils and the yet-to-be-graded essays off his desk, searching for something else. "Do any of you see my glasses?"

"They're on top of your head." Bruce leaned against the door frame and watched the entire debacle.

"Oh, right." Dr. Bruce grabbed the frames off his head and slipped them on. The top button of his lab coat came undone and they could all see he was wearing a _Star Trek_ t-shirt underneath, complete with the "boldly going…" slogan. "Now, if you'll excuse me…"

He nearly ran into Bruce on the way out the door. He looked up, gasped, and leapt backward. "Oh! Oh, bloody hell!"

"As we said, doctor…" Bruce shut the door behind him. "It's something of an emergency."

Dr. Bruce was backed up against his desk, staring at them all with deer-in-headlights wide eyes. His glasses had slipped down to the tip of his nose and with his bedraggled hair he looked like a mad cartoon character. Finally, he stuttered, "Who are you people? MI-5?" his voice dropped. "_Aliens?_"

"Actually, we're from another dimension," Clark explained, as carefully as he could because this Bruce looked like he was about to have a heart attack. "One where, apparently, the Wayne family never immigrated to America."

Dr. Bruce snorted. "Damn Yankees." Suddenly something dawned on him. "You could prove my resonance theory? Can I put you in the lab spectrometer?"

Diana sighed. "Please, doctor, focus. We need your help."

"Right, right." He was practically giddy. Clark had never thought that he would ever describe _any_ Bruce, _anywhere_ as 'giddy'.

"A fragment of alien technology landed in your world. It should be giving off a unique energy signature," Clark said. "We need to recover it, or else our universe is going to implode."

"Jesus. High stakes." The doctor got a little more serious. "And you think it's here? I'll definitely help you—they can't fire the chair of the Physics department for missing one meeting, now can they? –Just one question though—aren't you that gossip columnist for the Daily Planet?"

Clark was aghast. "I write _fluff pieces _about _celebrities_ in this universe?"

"It is another wrinkle for the 'ol cover story," Bruce said.

"So you're CIA?" Dr. Bruce asked.

Clark, Bruce, and Diana exchanged a glance and came to a silent agreement. Diana spoke first. "Actually, we're Justice League."

"You're what?" He gave them an utterly blank stare.

"I'm Superman," Clark said, and pointed to Diana. "And she's Wonder Woman."

"_What?_" The doctor was now looking at them like they were utterly crazy.

Clark jumped up into the air and hovered there, his eyes glowing red. Dr. Bruce went absolutely slack-jawed. Clark floated back down to the ground. The doctor backed away from him, slowly, like his feet were moving of their own accord. His mouth opened but no words came out. He swallowed twice and managed to whisper, "You have superpowers."

He lunged forward, grabbed Clark by the collar and shouted, "You have superpowers! That is so frickin' cool!" He spun around to Bruce. "What can you do?"

"Nothing," Bruce said. "I just know how to hit people real hard."

Dr. Bruce was almost hyperventilating. "So you guys are superheroes—superheroes!—and you need my help—mine!—to try and track down a world-saving alien device. Ohmygod this is so awesome!"

"Wait, wait," Diana said. "You guys have metahumans here, too, right?"

The doctor calmed down a bit. He shook his head. "No. Not at all. We haven't found another intelligent species, let alone people with powers like yours." He sounded almost depressed.

"How odd," Diana said. She looked at Clark. "No aliens, and yet you're still here, in this universe."

"Maybe I'm Ma and Pa's biological child here." Clark turned to the doctor again. "What about her? Have you ever heard of a Diana Prince?"

"Sounds familiar." Dr. Bruce thought for a moment. "I think you're a duchess in one of the little countries, actually."

Bruce sighed. "I know this is all very fascinating, but we really do need to track down that crystal."

"There's supposed to be a new-students presentation in here in just a couple of minutes, but if we go to my flat I'll probably be able to track it down." The doctor lead them out the door. Clark heard him mutter, "Man, am I a downer in that world."

Outside, he looked west and said, "We'll have to catch the bus."

"You live along the Thames?" Clark asked. Dr. Bruce nodded. Clark grabbed him under the arms and leapt upward. Diana took Bruce. "Good. We'll be much quicker than a bus—just point the way."

Dr. Bruce was grinning from ear to ear when they landed on the balcony of his flat. He did manage to restrain another _that was awesome!_, much to Bruce's relief. They stepped inside, through the sliding glass doors.

The interior was a mixture of bachelor pad, mad scientist's laboratory, and comicon. The living room furniture consisted of a duct-tape patched couch, a television, and a couple of folding chairs. A sprawling mess of wires and mechanical apparatuses overtook the kitchen table. On the bookshelf was a borwn box marked 'Comic Books' and one shelf held all action figures—_Star Trek, Grey Ghost, _and _Zorro_ ones, to be exact. The walls were plastered with posters, mostly from cult zombie movies and 60's sci-fi B-films.

Bruce grimaced.

Diana glanced at a magazine lying on the end table and turned a little pink. Dr. Bruce grabbed it and shoved it in a drawer. The cover very clearly had a naked woman on it.

"Sorry," he said. "I don't have many visitors. And despite what they tell you, real girls don't actually find scientists attractive."

Diana smiled at him. Clark leaned towards Bruce. "Better watch out. Your doppelganger has the whole kicked-puppy thing going on and trust me, girls _do_ dig that."

Bruce's scowl deepened. "Doctor. Could we please find this crystal?"

"Of course." Dr. Bruce was staring at Diana, a little lopsided grin on his face. Bruce wanted to smack it off him. The doctor whipped open his laptop and started typing furiously. About a minute and a half later he looked up. "What color did you say it was?"

"Blue." Clark tried to look over his shoulder.

"Found it." The doctor turned his laptop around so they could see the Mapquest page he'd pulled up. "Two weeks ago a crystal shard giving off unusual—meaning completely unique—radiation dropped in Yorkshire. MI-5 vans arrived a little later. The closest secret service base is right here." He tapped the screen.

"How did you find this so quick?" Diana asked.

"Theoretical physicists' message board." Dr. Bruce shrugged. "Trust me, an unusual radiation signature piques our interest. I might be able to get you through the front door—I did some government freelancing a while back, but any further…"

"We'll have to break in," Clark said.

The doctor looked up at them from his seat. "Does this mean I get to break into a secret government base with you? Because that would totally make my day."


	5. Trouble

~Chapter Four~

Dr. Bruce flashed his clearance badge at the secretary and smiled as he pushed a rather large cart through the hallway. He stopped at the first empty room and pulled open the box. "I don't see why you couldn't have just busted in here. They're not equipped for superstrength."

"Do you want to be the one to explain this to MI-5 after we skip dimensions again?" Bruce asked, stepping out of the box.

The doctor shrugged. "I'd just swig some alcohol and say I was drunk the entire time."

Clark scanned the walls. "I can see it. It's in a storage room down three floors and about five hundred yards north. Six guards and a maintenance man, plus a couple of researchers but they're in a lab so I doubt they'll notice us."

"This way." He led them down the hall. They snuck past a guard station (the rent-a-cop was somehow sleeping to "Material Girl") and had to edge along a wall to avoid the sweeping arc of a security camera. When they hit a sealed door with a keypad, Bruce yanked the faceplate off and had it hotwired in under thirty seconds.

Now they were in the black-ops part of the base. The halls were shadowy, stainless steel, and the windows in the doors were hung with blackout shades. According to Clark, they were nearly there.

They ducked into a cleaning closet as a group of four guards passed. Bruce caught sight of a thick door, with a twenty-eight pin tumbler and a biometric scanner. The crystal was definitely inside. Beside him, Dr. Bruce was humming the Goldfinger theme.

"Would you knock it off?" he snapped.

"Sorry," the doctor said. "Bond seemed appropriate."

Diana snickered.

"They're gone," Clark said. Bruce ran to the vault, put his ear against it, and turned each wheel carefully until the tumblers fell into place. A scanner slid out from the wall.

"Do you have clearance?" he asked.

Dr. Bruce snorted. "Why would we be sneaking around if I had security clearance for this deep in?"

"I've got it." Diana appeared from around the corner, dragging an unconscious guard. No one had even realized she had gone. She'd dropped her jacket and was wearing only tight jeans and a painted-on white t-shirt (courtesy of Metron) that showed off just how muscular she was.

The doctor was practically drooling. Diana saw him watching and smiled. Bruce was pretty sure that if they'd been anywhere but breaking into a government lab he would've decked the little nerd right then and there.

Diana pushed the guard's hand against the scanner and the door fell away. Sitting on a pedestal in the middle of the chamber was the crystal.

Bruce reached out for it, then paused. "When I grab this, we have to run. It's going to set off the sensors."

Everyone nodded. Bruce grabbed the crystal, shoved it in his pocket, and they all bolted as the klaxons shattered the silence.

A bolt of electricity ricocheted off the ceiling above their heads. Clark spun around and took down three guards with a single superhuman breath. Diana yanked open an elevator and they all dove inside. The doctor leaned against the wall, panting.

Bruce looked at him. "What the hell's wrong with you?"

"I'm sorry—I don't work out seven hours a day," Dr. Bruce snapped back. "Or really at all. It's kind of gross."

The elevator doors opened on the ground floor. The chaos—civilians and militants mixing, alarms ringing loud enough to drown out all speech—allowed them to blend into the crowd and walk right out the doors.

Back at the doctor's apartment, Clark put the new shard against the main crystal and watched as it was absorbed. The crystal shifted from blue to light purple.

In the living room, Bruce was looking at the shelf of comic books with an expression halfway between disgust and fear. The doctor was sitting on the couch, emailing the dean back and forth about why the head of Physics had missed a department-wide meeting. He was also stealing furtive glances at Diana every few seconds. 

She caught him looking. "Something wrong?"

Dr. Bruce jumped in his seat, and buried his face behind his computer screen. "Nothing! I…I, um, you're very pretty."

Diana lit up. "You're sweet."

The doctor blushed up to his ears.

Bruce looked as if his head were about to explode.

"All done," Clark said. The disc shimmered in his hand, already honing in on the next world. He saw Bruce's clenched fist and smirked. "Dr. Wayne, thank you for your help."

"Craziest day of my life," the doctor said, still staring longingly at Diana. "Seriously. Awesome. I should probably be thinking you."

"Portal's open," Bruce was standing in front of the whirlwind. Diana waved goodbye to the doctor and they all stepped inside.

"Why isn't the tunnel opening?" Diana asked, after the spinning silver didn't fade.

"Darkseid must be catching on," Clark said.

Diana grinned at Bruce. "You being all nerdy was absolutely adorable."

"Oh, so that's why you were practically throwing yourself at him." Bruce glared at her.

Diana glared right back. "Well, maybe you ought to tell me I'm pretty sometimes."

"You know, Di, he does have practically every episode of the Grey Ghost memorized," Clark said, ducking a look to kill from Bruce.

"Do not." Bruce slapped the cube again, as if that would unstick them from an interdimensional boom tube.

"What episode did Burt Ward guest star in?" Clark asked.

"Episode one-sixty—shut up, Kent." By now Bruce was practically glowering. "You never told us what Bria said to you. Maybe you should."

"Yes, do tell." Diana looked at him expectantly.

Clark blushed almost as red as the doctor had. Sheepish, he looked at his feet and said, "She called me cute."

Thankfully, he was save from Bruce's reaction to this by the boom tube, which opened under their feet and dumped them unceremoniously into a puddle of mucky water.

Diana sighed. "As if my shoes weren't already ruined."

Bruce was staring up at the sky. The danger alarms he'd carefully cultivated over the years were going off in his head. This was a skyline he didn't recognize, and he'd been to almost every major city in the world. All the buildings here were some sort of regulated mix of silver and black. He looked up into the sky and felt a tingle of cold: the sky was tinted yellow.

"Where are we?" Diana asked.

"No clue," Bruce said. He turned around. "Clark? You recognize this place?"

Clark was still standing in the alley, pinching the bridge of his nose like he was in pain. Bruce looked at him. "Clark?"

"There's this…buzzing in the air," Clark said and managed to smile. "It's giving me a headache."

"I don't hear anything," Diana said. "You're getting a headache from a _noise_?"

"It's more of a feeling than a noise." Clark stepped out from the alley. "But I'm fine. Let's go."

They started down the narrow street. People rushed past them, heads down. They chattered at each other but quietly. Bruce took a breath and tasted a metallic tang to the air. They walked until they hit a fork in the road.

"Let's split up," Diana suggested. "You two go ten blocks that way and I'll go ten blocks this way and if we don't figure out where we are by then we turn around and meet back here."

"I'll come with you," Bruce said.

"People are more likely to help out a lady than a lady and _you_." Diana gave him a pointed look.

Bruce sighed. "At least let's make sure that our comlinks still work in this universe."

Diana pressed her comm once, then switched it off again. "They work."

Bruce and Clark went left, Diana went right.

Clark shook his head. "Honestly. Do you two have to fight in the middle of an end-of-the-universe mission?"

Bruce stormed off ahead. "Fuck off."

Clark snorted and followed after.

They passed rows and rows of shops, apartment buildings, restaurants—all the trappings of a normal city. But Bruce couldn't shake the feeling that something was off. Behind him he heard Clark's footsteps slow a little. He sighed again—here they were, trying to find out where they'd landed, and Clark was sightseeing. He glanced back and saw Clark gazing into the shop windows. Bruce looked closer—Clark's eyes were a little bloodshot. Maybe there was something to this "buzzing" he'd complained about.

Six blocks and they hadn't seen so much as a bus stop, let alone a map helpfully marked with "you are here."

Clark grabbed Bruce's shoulder.

"What?" Bruce turned to him and saw Clark's glassy eyes and the way he couldn't quite keep himself standing. He managed to catch Clark just as he passed out.

Bruce pulled him into an alley and set him on the ground as gently as he could. He reached out and shook him. "Kent. Clark. C'mon, wake up."

Clark moaned but didn't stir.

"Sir." Bruce looked up and saw three policemen standing above him. But these officers were dressed in flack jackets, visors, and had AK-47's in their holsters. And despite the politeness their expressions were absolutely flat. "There seems to be a problem here."

Bruce hit his comlink. All he got was static. For a moment he wondered and then he saw the signal scramblers clipped to each officer's belt.

On any normal day, he could take down these three in a matter of minutes. But here he had no armor, no weapons, and there was a semiautomatic in the hand of his opponent. And then there was Clark, who was an open target. He couldn't protect himself and 170 lbs of Kryptonian deadweight.

Right now, he didn't have a chance in hell.


	6. Allegiances

~Chapter Five~

"I said." The head officer's hand shied towards his gun. "There's seems to be a problem here."

"Narcolepsy!" Bruce exclaimed. The officer's eyebrow quirked upward. Bruce swallowed. "Yes, narcolepsy. Very serious, you know. We um, we just got off the subway and he forgot to take his meds."

The second policeman— the one who Bruce had pegged as the idiot from the start—said, "Yeah! My grandma has that! She falls over asleep all the time and when we were kids we used to stick straws up her nose."

The head officer sighed and his hand fell back to his side. "Fine. But you had better find a hotel soon for your narcoleptic friend here."

"Sure, sure," Bruce said, frankly just ecstatic that that had actually worked.

The officers walked away. Clark shifted on the ground, pried his eyes open, and asked, "What happened…feels like someone hit me in the head with a brick…"

"Like I know—you passed out. Think you can manage another block?" Bruce pulled him up. Clark stumbled and leaned on Bruce but at least he was standing. "I think we should take their suggestion and find a place to lie low at least until we have internet access and can find out what's wrong with this place."

Clark nodded.

Bruce pulled Clark down the street towards a flashing _vacancy_ sign. At the same time he counted Clark's pulse rate. It was racing.

The man at the front desk gave him a room without asking for an ID when Bruce opened his wallet and flashed him a couple of hundreds. The room at least had dial-up. He left Clark sitting on the couch and went to filch a laptop from some unsuspecting banker-type.

His communicator buzzed. Diana. He'd forgotten all about her.

"Hey. We got a room in a hotel—it's a long story—you can meet us there." Bruce rattled off the address and the room number to her. "I'll be there in just a couple minutes."

He took a computer off a fat man (and didn't feel a lick of shame—not when the guy shoved a woman into a mud puddle because he was so damn late) and hightailed it back to the motel. Diana had let herself in and was sitting on the couch next to Clark, who looked thankfully pale but lucid. Bruce nodded to them and turned the computer on.

"Stole it," he said, before Diana could ask. She rolled her eyes. "Desperate times, desperate measures."

"Here-" Bruce pointed to a webpage. "Clark—I figured out what's making you sick. This world is irradiated with orange kryptonite."

"What?" Diana asked, practically jumping off the couch. Clark managed a moan.

"I found a history website. It says that in 1850 earth was _attacked_ by the Kryptonians when their world exploded and there were hundreds of refugees. And in response, earth scientists vaporized huge amounts of orange kryptonite." Bruce scanned down the page. "Now the descendents are depowered but tolerant of it…you on the other hand, are getting affected."

"Hurts like kryptonite," Clark murmured.

He got up (slowly, Bruce noted) and leaned over his shoulder to scan the screen. "Jesus. There's a prison for rouge Kryptonians." He peered closer. "That building…we passed that building. We're in _Metropolis_."

"It's there." Bruce pointed to the picture of the steel and concrete metahuman penitentiary. Diana gave him a quizzical look. "Think about it—if you were Darkseid, where would you hide the macine that reverses your grand plan? In the hardest place to get to, right? And in this universe that's the center of a fascist-run prison for aliens. We have to get inside."

Clark suddenly turned away and coughed into his hand. When he turned back there were droplets of blood on his lips.

"Sit down, Kal." Diana guided him back over to the couch. "Bruce and I will handle this one."

"I'm going to help," he said.

Bruce snorted. "And get yourself killed. Listen to the woman and sit."

Clark didn't protest, just put his head down on the worn upholstery. Bruce copied down directions to the Meta Containment Center and he and Diana set out. The directions weren't really necessary—the silver cylinder rose over Metropolis like a second sun.

A guard stopped them at the gate, checked their irises in a scanner and let them through. At least their counterparts in this dimension were in good standing. That could be used to their advantage. The first gate opened to a second, and after that they finally hit the solid titanium door that served as the visitors' entrance. Bruce wasn't even sure that "door" was the right word. More like fortifications for a war zone.

Another iris scanner let them inside. A woman in a fitted black jumpsuit and a visor pushed up to reveal green eyes stood behind a desk. "Can I help you?"

Bruce leaned over and put on his best charming smile. "We're reporters. We'd like to talk to a few prisoners."

The woman looked at him. "Do you have a press release form signed by the director and stamped with your designated arrival time?"

"Now, what kind of reporters would we be if we let you prepare for us?" Bruce laughed. "Say, would you like to have dinner sometime?"

The woman's face went from cold to homicidally hostile. "Sir, I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to leave if you don't have the proper papers. Now."

Bruce opened his mouth. The woman reached for the security button. Bruce and Diana left.

"Well that was worthless," Diana said as they approached the hotel. Bruce unlocked the room. Clark was still on the couch, slumped over and asleep. The kryptonite poisoning was setting in quick. "We need another way in."

Just as she finished speaking the phone rang. They both looked at it. The number was blocked—definitely not the front desk. Bruce picked it up.

"I wish to speak with Diana Prince." The voice on the other end was deep and choked with the telltale electronic-buzz of a voice scrambler.

"Who is this?" he demanded.

"You'll give the phone to Diana if you want to get into the Center."

Bruce handed it over. Diana listened for a minute, then walked into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. He heard her talking but couldn't make out the words. When she emerged five minutes later she hung up the phone before talking to him.

"They want me to meet them."

"You can't do that," Bruce said. "We don't know what 'they' want, or even who they are. You could get captured, or hurt. Where did they want you to meet them?"

"I can't tell you," Diana said, with a glance out the window. "They have agents everywhere. If I tell you they won't help us."

Bruce threw up his hands. "Which _of course_ makes them all the more trustworthy."

"Do you have a better idea?" Diana gave him a hard look and nodded towards Clark. "If these people can help us get out of here faster then we need to take them up on their offer. I'm going."

Diana arrived at the warehouse and found it empty. A small wisp of apprehension curled around her stomach. She yanked open the door, stepped inside, and peered into the gloom. "Hello? It's Diana Prince…I came…"

No sooner were the words out of her mouth than a panel slid back beneath her feet and she fell a long way down.

She landed in a pile of packing foam, inside a hive of mad activity. Men, women, and children in mismatched grey clothing worked on computers or cleaned nasty-looking weapons. Two big men with bigger guns trained them on her.

"Heel, boys. I have a feeling Ms. Prince here could tear your heads off before you got a shot in." A diminutive in a motorcycle helmet to hide her face stepped in front of Diana. Her voice turned on Di. "But don't you try anything."

"Of course not." Diana stood up, brushed herself off, and tried to place the voice. It was certainly familiar.

"Good." The woman (no—the _girl_, thought Diana) nodded. "Walk with me."

She led Di to a small room with a desk and a sleek black computer. The girl hit the mouse and brought up a picture of The Center. "We saw you trying to get into the prison. I think we can help each other. We'll help you get in if you help us break out a couple people. No real criminals—just dissidents the government doesn't like."

Diana held up her hand. "Before you go any further, you have to know—"

"That you're not from this dimension? Trust me, we know." The girl's turned the monitor back towards her and hit a few more keys. "Our Diana Prince is…quite visible."

She showed Diana another picture—mug shots. Of Clark. "This is the main man we want to get out. He was our leader, before he was captured in a protest. On this Earth, Kryptonians are still second—hell, third—class citizens. We're freedom fighters."

Diana barely listened to the last sentence. She had figured it out. "You—you're _Kara_."

The girl started, but finally reached up and took off the helmet to reveal Supergirl, with her hair cropped short and a thin, old scar along her hairline. She smiled. "Does this mean you're in?"

"It does."

"Then there's one other thing you should know." Kara turned the screen away again. "Eighteen years ago, a teenage girl was found half-drowned on Hawaiian beach. The girl was…special. Powerful. She was taken into custody by the U.S. government."

Kara continued. "We believe she was brainwashed, possibly tortured. If she ever remembered where she came from is debated. This woman is our greatest threat." She moved the screen so Diana could see it.

The picture was of a woman in a harsh suit and a thin smile, seated behind a desk. _Diana_ seated behind the desk. A wicked black gun was strapped into a holster at her side.

The caption read _Diana Prince—Director of The Metahuman Containment Center_.


	7. Breakout

~Chapter Six~

Bruce paced back and forth across the room. Diana had been gone for over an hour. He'd tried to hack her comlink from the stolen laptop but she'd anticipated him and turned it off. Damn that woman—she was going to be the death of him. Clark lay on the couch. Bruce threw open the blinds and shook him awake.

"Get in the sunlight."

"What?" Clark—bleary-eyed and dazed. They might not have two days.

"Get in the sunlight. That's how your powers work, in case you've forgotten."

Clark shook his head. "That didn't make me feel better. Can't I just stay right here?"

"When you were in the sunlight your nose wasn't bleeding." Bruce hauled him up from the couch and made him sit on the floor in the shaft of sunlight.

Clark blinked but didn't fight him on it. "Where's Di?"

Bruce sighed. "Good question."

Diana was on her stomach crawling through a ventilation shaft to the heart of the Metahuman Containment Center, with cobwebs in her hair. Today was going to be their D-Day, even before she had shown up.

"You have to understand," Kara had said, back in the base, over cups of weak tea, "what a valuable asset you are. The casualty costs we'll save if you can hold her off for us…that alone would be astronomical." The cup lowered. "I need to know _now_, are you in or out?"

"In," Diana said, fingering the lasso at her side.

And so here she was. Alone. Off to fight herself for the good of a world that wasn't hers. Kara's regiment had broken off a few feet behind, towards the cellblock where their Clark was being held. A reclaimed Bluetooth headset in her ear told her that in forty feet she would be directly over the Director's office. She had twenty seconds until the alarms sounded.

She reached the gate over the office, looked down to see herself sitting at a desk with a stack of mug shots and arrest reports all stamped with a big red K. Ten seconds.

One second.

The alarms blared, red lights flashing. Director Prince leapt from her chair, tossed the desk away like so much used Kleenex and dashed for the door. Diana ripped the grate from the ceiling and took her from behind. The Director's face slammed into the ground but she flipped over and kicked Diana in the stomach.

"Stop!" Diana shouted. "Don't you see you're making a mistake?"

The Director locked eyes with her. For an instant she paused, flinched, but the singular look of surprise hardened into hatred. "What are you? Some sort of rebel clone abomination?"

"I'm you." Diana grabbed Director Prince by the arms and threw her across the room. "From another world. Where I come from, you're friends with some of the people you've got locked up here. Not a mindless government prison warden."

The Director shrieked at her, blood trickling from her nose down over her lips. She flew at Diana, with all the rage of a goddess threatened. "They took me in! They saved me! I'm going to rip your head off, you stupid bitch!"

Diana reached for her, meaning to smack her away again. But the Director grabbed her arm and wrenched it behind her, back and up until it felt like her shoulder was about to splinter. She screamed, lost her grip on Director Prince, and found herself face down breath in carpet dust with the Director's boot pressed into the back of her head.

"This ends now." Diana managed to turn her head around enough to see the Director level a very large gun at her skull.

"She should be back by now." Bruce had given up on doing anything productive and had instead gone out and bought dinner for himself and aspirin for Clark.

Clark coughed, hard and wracking. No blood this time but for and instant he couldn't breath and a look of sheer panic flashed across his face.

Bruce jumped towards him. "Are you okay?"

Clark nodded and took a thankful, shaky breath. He smiled a little, fooling no one. "So you do care about me."

Bruce rolled his eyes. "I think Diana would get pretty angry with me—more so than she already is—if I let you die."

Clark sighed and curled up against the back of the couch. Night had fallen—no more sunlight to provide a little relief. The broken capillaries in his eyes had stained the whites pink.

"I'm giving her another forty minutes," Bruce said, as if he had some way of tracking her down after forty minutes that he didn't right now. Clark nodded, silently, his eyes half-closed.

The barrel of the gun bit into her temple. Diana hissed against the pain of the stiletto heel stabbing into the small of her back. "You're not going to do it. A real soldier would have shot me the minute I knocked them down."

Director Prince hit her across the back of the head with the butt of the gun. Hurt like hell, but it gave Diana enough time to reach her lasso and trap the Director's wrist in it.

Director Prince froze. Diana looked straight into her eyes. "Remember who you are."

The Director collapsed, knees gone weak. The gun clattered across the room. She stared at her hands, eyes glistening. "My gods…I—I…Mother must think I'm dead, I never went back. The things they made me do…"

"Come," Diana said, reaching out her hand. The Director took it. "You can help us now. Let the prisoners go."

Director Prince stared at the panel of buttons on her desk. Her hand wavered over the one that would open allt he cell doors, fighting years of brainwashing. Diana reached for her lasso again, but the Director reached out and hit the button hard. From the hallways came cheers and the screams of gaurds running from the people they'd held captive for years.

"Here." The Director walked over to a painting on the wall and tore it down to reveal a safe underneath. She opened it and pulled out the crystal shard. "When you put that lasso around me, I saw that you needed it."

"Thank you." Diana slipped the shard safely into her pocket. "If you want, I can tie you up, make them think that you were bested by me."

Director Prince smiled wanely and shook her head. "No, I don't think I could stand to see this building again, not for the rest of my life. My place is with the rebels."

Diana nodded, and left out the window.

When Diana burst into the hotel room, clothing ripped and cuts across her face, the first thing she did was run up to Bruce and shove the crystal into his hands. "I've got it. Come on, let's get out of here."

"What happened?" he asked, taking it all in.

"I'll fill you in later," Diana shook Clark to wake him up and tugged him to his feet. Clark took the cube from his pocket. It was already glowing. Bruce put the crystals together and watched them turn a watery green.

They were sucked into the vortex.

"You all right?" Diana asked Clark, once they'd landed. The cuts on her face had vanished.

"Dandy. Guess Metron's box really works." Clark jumped out of the street. "Though I don't think I want repeat that experience."

Bruce pointed up. "Guys…is that a zeppelin?"

A blimp drifted lazily across the skyline. A vehicle criss-crossed with copper pipes and rivets _put-putted_ down the street. Diana shrieked and leapt backward.

"What is it?" Bruce reached for her, then saw the metal spider scuttling along the ground at her feet. "Wait a second." The spider crawled over Diana's boot and up to a piece of trash. It ate it up.

"A trash-eating robot." Bruce knelt down and picked the thing up to study it. "I wonder if it's powered by the compacted garbage."

"Hey, you!" A man who was dressed in a Victorian-era police uniform ran up to him. "It's illegal to disturb the Eaters."

"Sorry, we—" Clark was interrupted by a rope ladder falling down from the sky and three men jumping into the alley.

The policeman reared back. "Pirates!"

A man grabbed Diana around the stomach. "Back off, copper, and the little lady doesn't get hurt."


	8. Clockwork

~Chapter Seven~

Bruce was gagged, bound, and sitting in the cargo hold of a blimp with an airpirate version of himself striding back and forth across the deck ranting. "And the Grey Lady has a sister! Remarkable!"

Bruce tried to mumble something sarcastic. The pirate peered at him and ripped off the gag. "Tell me, doppelganger, however did you come to be associated with her? She's a fascinating creature—just as fierce as the Grey Lady herself. Why, if not for the eye I'd have thought they were one in the same."

Bruce stared up at him. "We're travelers. Let us go."

The pirate snorted. "Yes, yes. You're an amazing facsimile of me. I suppose you've nothing to do with the Lady and her band of magical Amazons?"

He could hear Clark on the other side of the wall, banging Morse code. The pirate raised an eyebrow at the noise but didn't guess anything. Bruce translated the knocks in his head—_Where__are__you?__Diana__'__s__here,__we__'__re__OK.__Find__out__who__the__Grey__Lady__is._

Bruce tapped back, soft enough for just superhearing: _He__says__it__'__s__this__world__'__s__Diana._

The pirate Wayne was leaning forward on a barrel. "I'll cut you a deal, seeing as how I'm feeling generous today. You tell me where you all came from, and help me…liberate…some of my rightful property from the Lady's unscrupulous clutches, and I'll let you go."

"Deal," Bruce said. The pirate cut the ropes at his arms but left him tied at the feet. "We're from another world, a copy of this world but slightly different. We're trying to find a gem that will save our Earth from being consumed by living darkness."

Captain Wayne raised a single eyebrow, then grinned. "Ah, well. You may very well be madmen but I've led an odd life too. Benefit of the doubt, yes? And the Lady?"

Bruce shrugged. "My friend must be a piratess in this universe. I must admit, I never pictured her captaining a zeppelin over a steampunk-esque Britain."

Something exploded starboard. Pirate Wayne was thrown against the wall. Smoke poured from the hole where a wall had just been.

"Captain!" A clockwork robot in a French butler's uniform picked its way through the shattered barrels, scattered flour, and half-melted coins. Bruce heard sprockets and gears working in its chest. "We are under attack! It's the _Amazons_ sir, and their ship, the Themyscira!"

"Thank you, Alfred." Captain Wayne picked himself up off the floor, dusted the flour and sawdust off of his clothing (futilely) and slapped his hat back upon his head. "I believe I'm prepared for the scoundrels. Please tell the men to ready the cannons and fire to disable, not destroy. I want to _board_ that airship."

"Very good, sir," said the clockwork man.

The pirate pulled out his dagger and sliced through the ropes at Bruce's feet. "Come let's release your compatriots. Time for you to keep your end of the bargain."

Bruce jumped to his feet. Between getting kidnapped by an airpirate and the explosion, his Metron-given clothes were shredded. Captain Wayne's eyebrow quirked upward again. "Firstly, Alfred, please find our guest some proper attire."

The door to the cabin that Diana and Clark were being held in flew open. A man in a waistcoat strode in and untied them without a word. Clark peered up at the face under the cap and exclaimed, "Bruce?"

"Not a word," Bruce snapped. "We have to help him win this battle, get back his treasure or whatnot and then we can get off this balloon."

"Maybe, seeing as how things have worked out so far," Diana began, getting up and picking the rope fibers from her sleeve, "what we're searching for will be on that ship."

Another cannonball boom—the ship lurched right. The three of them grabbed ahold of the door and pulled themselves through to the observation deck. This was no simple hot air balloon. A galleon was suspended between two purple and gold balloons. Seamen (or airmen, Clark thought) worked everything from cannons to little clockwork bombs that latched onto the rhythm of the enemy ship's balloons filling and falling. The clash of centuries was dizzying.

Captain Wayne had his sword out, hanging off of the netting. Maybe a couple hundred meters away hung another ship, with blood red balloons. Bruce could just make out the figure of a woman in a corset and man's trousers standing in the crows nest.

Diana looked down and saw the smokestacks of London below.

The captain leapt off the netting, swung off one of the raised cannons, tucked his head down, and landed on deck right next to Diana. "You three, are you ready?"

A pair of doors on deck opened. Two crew members grabbed ropes and grunted with the effort of hauling up a shining gold whirligig from the cargo hold. Captain Wayne sheathed his dagger and leapt onboard. He grabbed Diana's hand and pulled her up, then waited with very little patience for Clark and Bruce to hop on.

The captain grabbed the controls and they lurched across the sky at what must have been seventy kilometers per hour. Three minutes and they slammed into the deck of _The__Themyscira_.

"Captain Wayne!" They were surrounded by beautiful women in shining armor, swords held to their necks. Too much magic for Clark's powers to work. Bruce questioned the wisdom of dropping right onto the enemy's ship, especially since none of them could just jump overboard. Through the crowd of luscious women strode one with a scarlet eyepatch dressed all in grey from her corset to her silver helmet.

"Grey Lady." The captain lifted his head against the sword. "You have something that's mine."

"I have what is _mine_," she said, almost in a whisper. She leaned close to the captain. "Perhaps you should have remembered how I won them from you in our last battle before beginning this one."

She pushed away the Amazon who had the blade to the captain's neck and brought up her own in its place. He smiled. "A gentleman never quits."

"A gentleman never fights a lady." The Grey Lady's mouth thinned into what might have been something of a grin.

"A lady?" Captain Wayne flashed a bit of white teeth. "I don't see any ladies here."

The Grey Lady's smile vanished as quick as it had come. "Well, you've made your mind up then. Amazons—put them in the execution chamber."

Six Amazons grabbed them by the arms and dragged them down a flight of stairs into a chamber with walls sealed with two inches of pine resin. The door swung shut behind them. A thick white gas started seeping in from tiny vents at their feet.

"What's that?" Diana asked.

"Poison. Not sure what." Captain Wayne started feeling the walls for joins. "Once it hits your chest it'll really start to kill you."

"What!" Clark tried to rip the door off. No luck—the runes glowed white. Bruce pulled out a batarang from his coat pocket and tried to hack through but the walls were too thick. The captain whistled merrily.

"Why are you _whistling_?" Diana exclaimed.

Captain Wayne looked at her. "Oh, we'll be fine. No worries. I've gotten out of this thing at least four times."

He pressed a point on the ceiling. A trapdoor popped open. "There we go." He pulled himself through and the others followed. They found themselves in a room stocked with gold and books and carved mahogany.

"What?" Bruce repeated after the others.

The captain smiled quietly. "It's a bit of a game we have."

They all stopped and stared at him.

"I think she likes me," he said, and kicked open a crate. "Ah. Here we go. Professor Ivan's jewels. She got them from me two weeks ago, but I do of course retake my rightful gains."

Clark looked at Bruce. "You're insane. Every version. Is this Diana his version of Selina?"

"I did not act like this with Selina." Bruce crossed his arms.

"Here you are now." The pirate tossed them the crystal. "Now run along. The Grey Lady will be here any minute now to stop my thievery." He winked salaciously at Diana.

Clark hurriedly put the crystals together. They faded into dull, dusky pink. For some reason a hint of worry crept up his spine. Bruce had barely touched the cube when the vortex sucked them in without a hint of gentleness. Diana was slammed up against the edge.

Just before the whirling mouth closed, they caught sight of the Grey Lady walking into the treasure room and grabbing a very happy Captain Wayne by the collar.


	9. Winter

**A/N:Sorry it's been so long between updates. I was busy with several (much too) long English papers and some other stuff. I also had to read _Frankenstein_ which as I think you will see influenced this chapter.**

~Chapter Eight~

Bruce landed in snow up to his knees. The wind howled and screamed around him. He couldn't see Diana or Clark anywhere—not that he could see very far in this blizzard anyway. Up ahead something big loomed like a mountain but all he could make out was the shadow. He started trudging towards it.

Diana woke up flat on her back in a snowdrift. Somewhere to her right she heard a snuffling sound, like a wet dog coughing. She stood up. "Hello?"

The snowfall lightened for a minute and she saw a figure standing a few feet ahead, hunched over, too small to be Clark or Bruce. The hairs on the back of her neck tickled.

The figure plunged towards her. Before it hit she saw a face—mutated, green, gleaming skin with open sores and a grinning, thin-lipped mouth.

Clark heard Diana scream. He turned and dashed towards the sound, but lost it in the howl of the wind. Two black outlines fell over each other in the snow. He ran towards them and pulled Diana off up and slammed the man clad in rags and jeans in the face. The man fell backwards and Clark gasped in horror.

Bruce had reached the snow-covered monolith. It towered above him. He reached out and swept the snow off of the structure. Underneath was thin green metal. He realized what he was looking at and staggered backward. In front of him was the decaying carcass of the Statue of Liberty.

And he could hear things moving and roiling and scuttling inside.

His communicator wasn't working. He still had no idea where Clark and Diana were. And he was about to freeze to death. Whatever was inside of Lady Liberty's chest cavity was doubtlessly warmer than staying out here. His fingers closed around the ragged edge of hole.

Bruce eased into the hole and crawled through the metal skeleton underneath the gold skin until he reached the elevator shaft. He pulled open a maintenance door and clambered inside. His numb fingers slipped on the metal. The statue may have been on its side, but there was still a good incline he didn't want to tumble down.

The elevator car was missing. Something glowed down in the subbasement. Bruce grabbed a hold of the oiled cable and skidded down. He felt something watching him but no matter how often he tried to catch a glimpse of it in the shadows he never did. The shaft was silent. Whatever had been making the sounds he'd heard before was gone now, or hiding.

He hit the bottom of the shaft and found himself in a half-collapsed government bunker. A fire burned in the center of the room, contained by rusted-out filing cabinets. His footsteps echoed off the walls. Blankets and cloth scraps were piled on the floor, along with gnawed-on bones and a pile of rotting produce in the corner. In the light of the fire he saw the blankets shift.

He reached down. The blanket stopped wriggling. He ripped it away and stumbled backwards—it was what might have been a little girl, if little girls had peeling skin and bald heads and swollen pale eyes.

Something jumped on him from behind, knocking him to the ground, its sharp claws digging through his shirt.

The thing hissed at Clark. Diana held her shoulder, blood weeping through her fingers. Clark tried to hit it with heat vision but his powers were going wild. Red light hit the monster but fizzled out on its skin and suddenly he couldn't make it work anymore. Diana lashed out at it but her fist bounced off its chest.

The thing roared.

Clark shoved Diana towards the structure in the distance. "Run!"

Bruce tossed the beast off of him. It snarled and gathered up the little-girl-thing in its arms. Bruce stood up, as slowly as he dared, and held out his empty hands.

"Look," he said, "I don't have anything to hurt you here, see? Nothing in my hands. I just came in here because it's cold out there. I don't mean to hurt anyone." In the back of his head, he figured he must be going crazy, talking to the thing that had just tried to kill him.

The thing snuffled at him, and then stepped back. Bruce heard feet shuffling all around him. From the shadows stepped several dozens of the things, children and adults, and that was when it dawned on him that these weren't creatures but people. An ice cold chill ran down his spine.

The people chattered among themselves in some language Bruce didn't understand, like some mix of half-remembered English and Spanish. He waited, absolutely still, while they decided whether to kill him or not.

Clark and Diana reached the hill. Light glowed from a hole in its side. Diana jumped in. Clark paused. "Are you sure this is a good idea?"

Diana pointed at the monster loping towards them through the snow. "Do you have a better one?"

One of the women stepped forward. Bruce slid his hand towards the pouch on his belt that held the batarangs. She reached out and softly touched his face. Bruce froze. She made a tiny, painful sound. He noticed she was blind in one eye, on the same side of her face where she was missing chunks of hair.

The other people started coming out of their hiding places slowly. Life at the little colony resumed around him. The children washed rags in bowls of melted snow while the adults tended to the fire and chopped up some animal with only one back leg. It seemed they were content to ignore him as long as he wasn't a threat.

Someone screamed.

Bruce spun around. The people dashed in all directions, scattering back into the shadows.

Clark and Diana tumbled out of the elevator shaft, with something making a sound like hell unleashed not all that far behind.


	10. Apocalypse Times

~Chapter Nine~

Bruce leapt backward as the thing tumbled down the shaft, landing on Clark and Diana's heels. It was monstrously large, ten or eleven feet tall, with a hulking body and misshapen muscles. It smelled like rot.

Clark reared back, ready to hit it again, despite his lack of powers. The thing jumped up, drool splattered across its cheeks.

The woman in the tattered blue dress leapt in front of Clark and shoved him aside. She grabbed the front of the thing's shirt and began singing to it in sounds that were half-hiss and half-lullaby.

Clark stared. "It…it's one of them."

Bruce nodded. "Mutated beyond all intelligence."

The woman petted the man-thing on the head and fed him some stewed meat out of her hand. Bruce shivered, just a little bit. His skeleton looked _wrong_ weighed down with lumpen muscles and tendons connected in the wrong places.

"We need to find the crystal," Clark said. "There isn't anything we can do for these people, right now."

Bruce pulled the crystal from his pocket and held it up in front of the people. One man's eyes went wide. He grabbed the crystal and tried to pull it from Bruce.

"No you don't," Bruce said. "Diana, can you use your lasso and find out what he knows? Obviously he's seen it."

Diana looked down at her lasso. Her powers weren't working—would her lasso? She didn't want to think about what it would mean if it didn't. "I'll try."

She mimed to the man to hold out his wrist, and gently put the loop over his hand. Nothing happened. No golden glow. No flash of insight. She might as well have been holding a piece of very fancy rope. "I…it's not working."

She looked terrified. "My powers came from Themyscira itself. If they're not working, that means that the island—and my mother and sisters—are gone in this reality."

"Bombed," Bruce said. "This whole earth is irradiated. Toxic wasteland."

The man had slipped out of the lasso and back into the group. He was speaking to the others in quick, harsh sounds. The people were still watching the three dimensional travelers. Finally the woman who Bruce had encountered first stepped out of the crowd and gestured for them to follow her down a dark, cold hall.

Bruce, Diana, and Clark glanced at each other but followed.

There was no light. The woman didn't even pause, as if he'd been retracing this same handful of corridors her whole life.

A dim lamp glowed at the end of the hall. The woman led them inside. A girl sat on a rusted office chair, cooing to the baby in her arms. The lamp sat on the floor at her feet. Clark stepped closer and saw that the crystal they needed was tied to the baby's chest with twine. While he watched, the baby coughed and struggled to breathe, it's chest rattling like it was full of dust. When it turned its head, he caught sight of open sores and blisters on its back.

The girl looked up at them with sad, sad eyes.

Bruce knelt by the girl and pulled a tricorder from his belt. It beeped and whirred, and Bruce's expression went from concerned to grim.

He turned back to Clark and Diana. "The baby's got advanced radiation poisoning. The New Genesis crystal is all that's keeping it alive."

"We can't take it," Diana said.

"No, we can't." Bruce slipped the tricorder back in his belt.

The girl was watching them. Of all the mutated humans, she was the most normal-looking, except for her eyes which were a strange amber color. For a minute Clark thought she could understand them, but of course that was ridiculous.

She started singing to the baby as she slipped the twine necklace off its tiny body.

Diana grabbed her wrist. The girl looked up, smiled like it was the end of the world, and tossed the crystal to Bruce. He caught it on instinct, still holding the main crystal in his other hand, and the two swirled together before he could stop them.

The vortex yanked them away just as the baby turned is head towards the girl and closed its eyes.

Bruce landed somewhere dry, for once, with Clark at his left and Diana at his right. Diana looked shaken.

"I can't believe she…" Diana said, and trailed off. She shook her head silently.

"There's nothing we could have done." Bruce tried to recognize where they were. By the street signs it should be Gotham. But everything looked…_new_. They were standing in front of a liquor store, but the neon wasn't burned out and there wasn't a pimp standing by the door.

"Is this Gotham?" Clark asked.

"I…think so," Bruce said, which wasn't a sentence he ever thought he'd encounter. "Look, we've always been set down somewhere close to either one of us or something useful."

He peered into the window of the liquor store. The cashier was ringing up three bottles of vodka, a handful of different gin brands, and a tall blue bottle of whiskey.

And Bruce thought he recognized the buyer.


	11. Aftermath

~Chapter 10~

Bruce turned back to Clark and Diana and pointed into the store. "I think that's me."

Yet another sentence he never expected to say.

"What should we do?" Diana asked. "We can't just go up to him without knowing how this world is different from ours. Remember what happened in that gender-swap world."

"Well _I_ can't go," Bruce said. "But you could. At worst he doesn't know who you are; at best he thinks you're this world's Wonder Woman. Nothing around here seems that different. Just a tad cleaner."

"I will," Clark said.

"Good. He's—" Bruce looked into the window again and stopped. "He _was_ right there."

"Now you know how the rest of us feel when you do that." Diana rolled her eyes at him. "To Wayne Manor then? Unless you think he went somewhere else."

Bruce hailed a cab (another rarity in his Gotham) gave the driver his address. He did get a strange look in return, so at least not everything was different.

"You seem pensive," Diana said, as they were squeezed next to each other in the backseat.

"I don't drink," Bruce replied. "So I don't know why I'd even be in a liquor store."

"Maybe this universe's Alfred finally decided to make you do some errands for him," Clark said.

"Or this universe's you throws parties without having to be forced to at gunpoint," Diana added.

Bruce glared at both of them. "Ha ha, you're both _so_ funny."

"Oh, come on." Diana poked him. "Without us you'd probably be a hermit in that cave of yours."

This time it was Bruce's turn to roll his eyes. The cab stopped in front of the gates of Wayne Manor, which meant that luckily Diana didn't catch him. He paid the driver and they stepped out.

"Well," he said, "this is new."

The grass hadn't been mown in weeks, if not months. The gates had been left open. Four days' worth of mail was shoved in the box, and rain-ruined newspapers littered the foot of the drive.

"Sheesh." Clark pushed the gates open further so they could slip through. The ungreased hinges screeched. "Did Alfred decide to stop landscaping?"

"We hire people to mow the lawn," Bruce said. "Did you honestly think Alfred did it all? He's 76."

Clark shrugged. "He's always around."

Bruce shook his head at them and walked up the drive. Clark and Diana paused at the door, but they didn't have a better plan and only a tiny bit of time to get through this universe anyway. Diana knocked on the door.

No one answered.

Clark cocked his head to the side. "I can hear someone moving around in there."

Diana knocked again, and rang the bell twice. Bruce stepped off the porch, behind the hedge where he wouldn't be seen.

The door opened. Bruce leaned against the doorframe. He looked like he hadn't shaved or slept in three days and was about ten or fifteen pounds lighter than their Bruce.

For an instant, he just stared at them. Then he jumped at Clark and pinned him to the ground, his fist about three inches from Clark's face. "I don't care who you are; you've really fucked up by coming here dressed up like that."

"What?" Clark said, just as this Bruce went to punch him in the face.

Bruce jumped out of the bushes. He and Diana grabbed the other Bruce and yanked him off of Clark. The two Bruces looked at each other, and the other one's shoulders sagged.

"Not a shape-shifter, then," he muttered. "What are you? Alternate universe ones?"

"Yes." Clark nodded eagerly. "We need your help to find—"

"I can't help you." Bruce turned away from them and back towards the door.

Diana put her hand on his shoulder. He froze. "Please, Bruce. Can't you at least tell us what's happened here? It's clean, half the buildings are different, and it seems possible, but you…" She stopped herself before she said something to make him not want to help them even more.

"Oh, that's easy," he said. "Don't you see? We saved the world."

Then he turned on his heel, stepped back into the Manor, and slammed the door in their faces. Diana banged on it again.

Bruce sighed, reached under the step, and pressed two buttons cleverly hidden in the concrete. The door unlocked with a click. Diana and Clark gave him a look. "What? Tim can be forgetful sometimes."

They entered the house apprehensively. The interior was just as shabby as the exterior. Everything was covered in dust. A dirty plate and cup rested on the stairs. No one had vacuumed in weeks.

Clark tried to find the other Bruce, but his x-ray vision was blocked by the old lead paint in the walls. If he listened he could hear glass tinkling from the west and quiet muttering. "I think he's in the kitchen."

Bruce led the way, pushing the polished walnut doors open with such force that they banged against the walls. The other Bruce was leaning against the island, pouring vodka into a drinking glass. When they walked in he sighed at them but nothing more.

"You can't get rid of us that easily," Diana said. "Our universe is dying. We only have two days here to find the piece we need to save it. You have to help us."

"Actually, I don't _have_ to," Bruce said, and finished filling the glass.

Clark scanned the kitchen. Empty liquor bottles in the trash. Nothing in the fridge but a spoiled gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, and a couple of take-out containers. He looked up through the floors to Bruce's bedroom. The bed was unmade, dirty clothes were piled on the floor by the window, and there was a stack of glasses on the bedside table.

"Yes, you do," their Bruce replied. "You're not going to let an entire dimension full of people die, are you?"

Bruce laughed. Clark shivered. He drank a mouthful of vodka, set the glass down, and looked them straight in the eyes. "I can't help you. I don't know what the hell you're looking for, and anyway, knowing what makes my world different from yours won't get you any closer."

Their Bruce pulled the crystal from his pocket. "This gives off New Genesis radiation. You can track it with the computer."

Bruce shook his head. "I haven't been down there in four years."

"What?" their Bruce exclaimed. It was one of the few times Clark had ever seen him taken aback. "Why not?"

The other Bruce shrugged, tiredly. "I told you. We saved the world. It only cost us seven million lives."

They all stared at him. He took another sip of alcohol and a small breath before continuing. "Aliens from a different dimension started dropping time bombs on us. Devastated half of Gotham, most of Central City, and completely took out Keystone. We never found out what they were called, but they were near impossible to beat. Decimated a third of the army.

"We kept throwing people at them, and they tore through them like used Kleenex. One took Shayera's head off over Kansas, and the JSA was defeated within hours of the initial strike."

He looked down into his glass but didn't take another drink.

"Eventually we had to start killing them, just to make it a stalemate instead of a bloodbath. That was when the bigger ones started coming through. By now there was only a handful of us left. I'd told Dick and Tim to stay inside, safe, but while I was gone they went out and—"

He broke off, swallowed. "We found the dimensional portal on the dark side of the moon. Those of us that were left—me, the two of you, Wally—went up in the Javelin. Mr. Terrific had made a bomb that would close the portal if we got it through."

He looked at Diana, almost longingly. She tried to wipe the horrified expression off her face. "You and Wally were killed holding off the hordes while Clark and I got the bomb set up. Then we realized that the only way to get it through safe was for one of us to take it in."

He smiled darkly and thinly, and looked at Clark. His hand tightened around the glass, like he wanted to break it but knew better. "I was holding it. But you—oh, just like you would—you grabbed it from me and superspeed and went through yourself."

The rest of the glass was drained in one go. "And yet, lok how much better everything is now! Oh, I admit it. Most of Gotham's new and clean. There's no supervillains.

"Most got killed when Arkham, Stryker's, and Blackgate got bombed and more died fighting. The few left weren't that bad to begin with—people like Pied Piper and Trickster—and went straight after the war. No one wanted any more dying. Hell, even world peace is still holding."

"Yes," he dropped the glass in the sink and his voice went quiet. "Everyone's happy now."

"I-" Diana began, but couldn't think of anything remotely adequate to say.

"So you'll excuse me if you're not really the people I wanted to see." He turned away from them, on the pretense of capping the bottle.

"Well you still have to help us," Bruce said. Clark elbowed him in the ribs and looked aghast. The other Bruce raised an eyebrow at him. His eyes narrowed. "Because I'm sure that the Justice League didn't die just so you'd have time to take up drinking. "

The temperature in the room dropped thirty degrees and everything went deathly silent. The two Bruces stared at each other, and for a minute Clark thought the one with the bottle in his had was going to leap across the countertop and knock theirs to the ground.

Instead he just laughed again, no less chilling than before, pointed to the grandfather clock in the study. "Use the computer. Do whatever the hell you want. Just leave me alone."

With that, he walked upstairs and left them alone in the kitchen.

Bruce went to the clock, spun the hands expertly, and stepped back to let the door swing open. They tramped down the stairs. The Batcave was dirty and dusty but at least the computer looked dry and somewhat maintained.

"How terrible," Diana said, when they were all seated in front of the screen. "I just…I just can't imagine it."

"I know what you mean." Clark shook his head.

Bruce stayed silent, typing in a worldwide search for New Genesis radiation. His eyes stayed firmly on the computer screen.

All Clark could think about was the bottles sitting on the kitchen counter. He started to say something.

"If you ever do that to me, I will dig you up and kill you again. Understand?"

Bruce glared at the both of them. Then he went back to typing in search parameters like this wasn't the most disturbing universe they had been in so far. "This'll probably take a couple of hours."

Clark heard a tiny sound on the stairs. He glanced in the reflection on the computer screen and saw the other Bruce standing on the top stair, just watching them, quiet and alone. The expression on his face was unreadable. As Clark watched, he closed his eyes for just a second, then opened them again and retreated back upstairs.


	12. Into the Fire

**A/N:**** To anyone who's been reading my past one-shot series (serieses?), I am thinking about starting another one. If you have any prompts, please read and review (and even if you don't have prompts-I love reviews!).**

~Chapter Eleven~

"I'm getting a faint trace of New Genesis radiation underneath of 5th street," Bruce said, leaning over the batcomputer like it was his. "It's not as strong as I would expect, but maybe this is a smaller shard, or maybe Darkseid masked it."

"How are we going to get under the street?" Diana asked, leaning against the counter. They'd been at this three hours.

"I know the sewers by heart, if we—"

"No, you don't." They all looked up to see the other Bruce sitting on the stairs, with a glass resting on his knee. Clark couldn't tell what was in it. "They redid them all after the war. They go deeper now and curve funny. You can drown in there if you don't know where the spouts are."

"Are you offering to take us?" Diana asked.

The other Bruce shrugged. He seemed to do a lot of that. Diana wondered if he'd cared about anything one way or another, after the war. "If you want me to I suppose I'm obligated."

"Great." Their Bruce said, somewhat sarcastically, and slipped his jacket back on. "Let's go."

"Don't bother with disguises." The other Bruce stood up and tossed his glass into the grotto, where it shattered far, far below. "Just put on a hat."

They were standing above the manhole on 5th street, ready to go down and retrieve the crystal, when the alarm went off in a jewelry store across the street. The other Bruce looked up for a minute and then ignored it. Smoke poured form the broken windows.

"We have to help!" Diana shouted, more at Bruce than in any actual excitement. Before he had the chance to shrug infuriatingly again, she grabbed him by the arm and the four of them ran and/or were dragged over to the storefront.

"I thought you said there wasn't any more crime in Gotham," Clark said, as he plunged into the black acrid smoke.

Both Bruces snorted. "This? This is nothing."

Clark, in the smoke and the lead dust, couldn't see anything. But he heard the crackle of a growing fire and a little girl screaming upstairs.

Bruce found a man on the floor and took his pulse. He was alive, breathing fine, but out cold. He tilted the man's head to the side and found his hair matted down with blood. This was a robbery, not a simple fire or a stupid prank.

The other Bruce and Diana ended up together at the back of the store. Two forms lurched towards them in the dark. One had something long and shining in its hand. Too late, Diana realized that one was a man in a ski mask with a metal baseball bat and the other was a man with two long knives.

Bruce grabbed for the one with the bat, Diana for the one with the knives. She punched him in the stomach, trying to rob him of breath, but he wouldn't go down. He had the haunted look of someone who didn't know why he was doing this. She pulled his jacket sleeves down and tied them at superspeed so he couldn't escape.

She pushed him towards the wall, to get him out of the way, but he fell over and tripped Bruce. The man with the bat saw his opportunity and took a swing at her head, quicker than she could hope to see.

Bruce grabbed her and pushed her away. The bat connected with his skull with a sickening, metallic crack. He went down.

Diana took the bat and swung it around while the robber, like an idiot, tried to hold on and ended up colliding with a bracelet display case. He slumped to the ground. She tied him up with one of the velvet ropes that would ordinarily be cordoning off the lines.

Then she knelt nest to Bruce and shook him gently. He stayed quiet. She touched his hair and found blood on her fingertips.

He moaned, opened his eyes drearily and sat up with his head on his knees. Diana put her arm around his shoulders and felt very bad because if this were _her_ Bruce who'd just gotten a concussion protecting her then she would certainly be kissing him right now. But as it was she just let him drop his head on her shoulder.

"What happened?" Her Bruce emerged from the thinning smoke dragging another unconscious hood by the back of his coat.

"He got a metal baseball bat to the back of the head."

"Ouch." Bruce winced in sympathy and tossed the whimpering robber down next to the other two. "Clark and I took care of the fire. Simple smoke bomb, though it ignited the curtains in the back. We'll go get the crystal. You stay here and make sure he doesn't die or anything."

Diana nodded. Bruce walked off again, and faded from her view into the grey mist. The first time she had even seen Bruce truly knocked out it had scared the hell out of her. She'd seen him quiet and waiting and pensive, but never so _still_. This universe's Bruce scared her more than even that.

She sat there for awhile, with her back to a jewelry case full of very expensive necklaces.

Her comlink clicked on. Clark's voice, static-y and tinny. "We're going down. Bruce stole the sewer map off of the other one."

They cut out again. The other Bruce stirred against her, painfully. He opened his eyes halfway and gazed up at her like he'd never seen her before.

The comlink cut back in. Bruce this time. His voice was tight and harsh, the way he got when he was frustrated and couldn't do anything about it. "It's not here. That's why the radiation signature was so faint. Darkseid must have decided this wasn't secure enough and moved it. We're heading back up."

Silence again.

The other Bruce shifted against her shoulder again. His eyes focused on her and he asked, slurred, in some mixture of sleepiness and hurt and hope, "Di?"

She knew he wasn't asking about her. But she didn't have the heart to break him again, so she just rubbed his shoulder and said, "I'm right here."


	13. Down in Graves

~Chapter Twelve~

The next morning, after a night of fitful sleep for all of them, they reconvened in the Wayne Manor kitchen. Bruce dug around in the freezer and found an unopened package of storebrand waffles under all the ice.

"Do you think we should go check on him?" Diana asked, looking up towards where the master bedroom was.

"It was just a concussion." Bruce shoved the waffles into the toaster.

"Your definition of 'just' and mine are completely different." Diana rubbed her eyes, trying to wake up. She didn't know how many objective days they'd gone without sleep but it was three at least.

There were heavy footsteps on the stairs. They all paused, Bruce included.

The other Bruce walked into the kitchen, gave them a look like _you're still here?_ and rummaged around in the cabinet until he found a bottle of whiskey.

Clark glanced at the clock. "Little early, don't you think."

"My head hurts." Bruce slopped the drink into a glass. "I need whiskey. You going to stop me?"

Clark looked over to their Bruce, still fiddling with the toaster, for support. He got nothing. The other Bruce tipped the glass back and drank half of it.

"Aren't you going to back me up here?" Clark whispered.

"No." Bruce managed to jam two waffles into each toast slot. "He can do what he wants."

"Surely you have to find this disturbing."

"Of course. But—" Bruce stopped.

"But what?" Clark looked at him and suddenly realization dawned. "You understand it, don't you? You think this is what you would do?"

"No. No, I-" Bruce sighed. "Everyone here is _dead_, Clark., and there's not even a reason to keep being Batman. I may not like it but…I see how things could have led to this."

Clark grabbed his shoulder so Bruce had to drop the waffles and look at him. "I don't care if I do die, Bruce, if you go down this road I swear I'll make sure and come back just to smack you upside the head."

Bruce smiled slightly and handed him two hot waffles.

The other Bruce walked past and plucked one from his hands, then went and sat down at the table as far from Diana was possible. She looked almost a little hurt.

Bruce tried to ignore the fact that she seemed to appreciate every version of Batman but him.

"So we're back where we started," Clark said, and tried not to regret having to go into the Gotham City sewers for nothing.

"Well don't look to me to help you." The other Bruce ripped the waffle into strips and dripped it into his whiskey. Clark wondered if at this point he was just doing it to get a rise out of him. "Last time I tried that, I got knocked out in a jewelry store."

Something beeped. Both Bruces jumped. Theirs ran to the grandfather clock and bounded down the stairs. Clark and Diana looked at each other and followed. Bruce was already at the computer, staring at the globe projected in the screen. There was a strobing read beacon over the middle of Iowa. Bruce pointed. "That's where the crystal is."

They printed off the coordinates. The other Bruce was still sitting at the table when they came back up.

"We need to borrow the plane," Clark told him.

Bruce barely even shrugged. "Where are you going?"

Diana read off the coordinates. Bruce tried to hide his reaction, but Clark heard his pulse rate jump and saw the way his hands went utterly still. "You're not going to be able to get in there. It's—"

His eyes dropped to the table. "It's the site where the first bomb dropped. Now it's a memorial. Those coordinates you've got is the center, where…some of the bodies are. You can't get in there."

"But _you_ can, right?" Clark asked.

Bruce crossed his arms and still didn't meet their eyes. "I don't want to go there."

"We need your help," Diana said, but he gave her such a hard, angry look that she stopped short.

"I _did _help you," he snapped, his voice rising. "I did. I did what you wanted me to. I'm not going there."

"Are you really going to be a coward?" Clark asked, before their Bruce could stop him. "Take the easy way out and let us fail?"

"A coward?" The other Bruce was shouting. "I don't want to see your dead bodies! How's that for a reason? If I'd wanted an easy way out I would have put a gun to my head as soon as I knew the war was done for good. But I stayed around, just in case something ever happened, in case—"

"In case we came back?" Diana asked.

Bruce stopped, and looked at her, like he was daring her to take it back. She didn't. After nearly a full minute he turned for the door. "Fine. I'll take you. But after this—you're gone."

He stalked off to the Batcave's teleporter and punched in the coordinates, barely waiting for them to follow.

The memorial was white and tall, marble, with pillars like an old chapel, with no apparent entrance. It sat in the center of a grassy Iowan field that was dotted with hundreds upon hundreds of gravestones of the same shining white rock. Clark stared up at it and couldn't decide how he felt about the statues of the six of them (everyone but Batman) that stood majestic on the curved roof.

"Gaudy, isn't it?" Bruce asked, without a trace of bitterness.

Their Bruce hung back, like _he _was the one who should be apprehensive here.

The other one stepped up to the wall and slipped his hand into a thin crack where two of the marble slabs met. Something beeped so quietly that even Clark just barely caught it. A tiny glass plate popped out from the wall, and Bruce typed something into the translucent surface.

One of the pathway stones clicked and slid back, revealing a stairway down into the dank ground. Bruce took the steps two at a time and led them into the crypt.

The shrine above must have been hollow, just a diversion and a spectacle, because this was where the bodies were. Six white coffins, with their emblems engraved in the lids and glass-fronted shadow boxes with their costumes folded carefully inside.

Diana's tiara and bracelets were missing, given back to the island, Clark assumed. His cape was gone, too.

"Lois took your cape," Bruce said, like he was a telepath now, too. "It was pretty easy actually, to keep your identities hidden. Not to hard to slip in a few extra bodies. And in times like these, no one really feels like questioning their symbols."

"Oh," Clark replied, because what the hell was a reasonable response to anything that this Bruce said?

Diana slipped the device Metron had given her from her pocket and held it up. It chimed softly, stronger when she turned left, and finally whined like a teakettle when held over the coffin with Clark's emblem on it.

"Go ahead," Bruce said, with a near-sigh of relief. "It's empty. The government just weighted it down for the parade and the funeral."

Clark reached out for the lid and lifted it. He was hit with a wave of something like déjà vu's opposite and sinister twin. But there wasn't anything in the coffin, and least not anything to spark spontaneous dread, just two bags of what looked like gravel and the crystal nestled in between them.

Their Bruce reached in and took it. The other crystal was already in his hand, like all he wanted was to be out of here, and he smacked them together with a small ferocity that startled Clark.

The vortex opened. The other Bruce barely flinched.

Metron must have momentarily gained the upper hand, because the swirling light bloomed in front of them instead of snatching them away. Bruce jumped in and Diana followed. Clark turned and waved goodbye, because it seemed appropriate, before starting after them.

Bruce grabbed his wrist. "Wait."

Clark looked at him, wondering.

"I—" Bruce began and faltered. "Don't let him push her away, okay? He listens to you more than you think."

Clark was too taken aback, just for a second, to respond. When he found his voice he said, "I promise."

Bruce nodded and let him go.

The last glimpse Clark caught of this universe was darkness falling on his own tomb.


	14. The Ninth World

~Chapter Thirteen~

"This world looks normal," Diana said, hopefully. They were standing on 2nd street in Metropolis, surrounded by glittering skyscrapers. So far, Clark couldn't find a single thing out of place.

"Yeah, it'll probably be real easy," Bruce replied, his voice dripping with sarcasm. Diana's eyes narrowed. Clark groaned inwardly and stepped between them before any words were said.

"Fine then." Diana stormed off in the general direction of Clark's apartment building. Bruce rolled his eyes at her back.

"Stop doing that." Clark elbowed him. This promise he made was going to be harder to keep than he thought, what with Bruce actively trying to annoy his girlfriend at every possible opportunity. "If you keep acting like you don't want to be around her then she's not going to want to be in this relationship anymore."

Bruce gave him a look, and then he stalked away too.

Clark sighed and followed his two very obstinate friends.

There was indeed a Clark Kent listed on the door of the building. On the way over they'd seen a newspaper with Superman in the headline, and from the grainy picture it didn't look like there was someone else in the cape. Clark peered up to the window that should be his and saw someone moving inside. "Let's fly up to the balcony."

They landed softly and Clark rapped on the sliding glass door. There was a flurry of noise inside and then a shirtless Superman threw the door open. He stared at them. "Who…what…?"

"We're from a different universe." Clark was getting tired of having to explain this. "We need your help."

"Well, certainly," Superman said, "but—"

"Clark? What's going on?" the bedroom door opened and Wonder Woman stepped out, in a sheer, extremely short nightgown.

Bruce's jaw hit the floor. Clark's eyes almost popped out of his skull. The two Wonder Women just stared at each other.

"So what can we help you with?" Superman asked, jovially.

Clark swallowed, and shook himself out of the shock. "We're trying to find a piece of a New Genesis device. I…um…um…" His train of thought crashed and burned when Wonder Woman slinked her arm around Superman.

"He means it looks like this." Bruce pulled the crystal from his pocket, all the while glaring murder at Superman. The crystal now resembled two sides of a rough hewn cube. "And it's vital that we find it quickly."

"Sure!" Superman looked at his (…wife? …girlfriend? Bruce didn't want to speculate). "We'll go get dressed. Give us ten minutes."

True to their word, they were costumed in minutes. After offering them pancakes (well, _some_ things don't change), Superman said. "The quickest way to locate it will be from the Watchtower. We can probably find it in an hour or two."

Bruce frowned. "I think it'd be faster to go to the Batcave."

"The what?" Superman blinked at him. "Who _are_ you, anyways?"

Baffled, Bruce said, "I'm Batman, of course."

Wonder Woman's eyes widened. "You're a member of the Justice League in your universe? In ours you're…a…well, you're Catwoman's partner. Whether that makes you a hero or a villain I don't know."

Diana gave Bruce a sharp look, like this was somehow cheating on her.

Bruce ignored it. "Fine. Just drop us by Wayne Manor in Gotham and we'll locate it. Then you can pick us up and we'll get the crystal."

"Wayne Manor?" Superman was looking increasingly confused.

"There's no Batcave here." Bruce turned to Clark and Diana. "It's connected. Maybe the Waynes never got into coal business where they made the family fortune. It's probably why I'm teamed with Catwoman here, too."

Diana ignored his pointed final sentence. "To the Watchtower it is, then."

Bruce was sitting in the monitor bay, scanning the globe. The two Dianas had gone off to get iced mochas, because it was going to be at least an hour and besides, Clark was pretty sure that Diana didn't want to be looking over Bruce's shoulder right now. Clark himself sat at the back of the monitor bay and stared out the window.

"So I take it you and Di aren't together?" Suddenly Superman was behind him.

Clark laughed. It was almost ludicrous to imagine. "No. Not at all. She and Bruce kind of have a thing, though."

Superman's eyebrows went up. "Oh."

They sat in silence for a minute. Clark turned. "What about Lois Lane? You never considered her?"

"Lois?" Superman frowned. "She's swell, I guess. But Di…Di and I are more that just friends, and it's nice to be with someone who's like me."

Clark nodded, although he still couldn't see how the man could call Lois simply "swell."

"Got it." Bruce spun around in the chair. "It…well, it says that the crystal is onboard."

"Wally found a box giving off strange radiation in a crater a few months ago." All the men turned to see that both Dianas had returned. "It's in J'onn's lab, I think."

Superman vanished in a gust of wind and returned a hair of a second later with a foot-long lead box. Clark reached out and opened the lid. This crystal was cracked and dull, but it still thrummed in his hand when he lifted it from its coffin.

Diana's eyes settled on Bruce as if to say _See? I told you it would be easy_. He either didn't notice or chose not to. Clark handed him the crystal. Bruce didn't even have to push them together—they jumped and melded like opposite magnets.

"So what happens nex—" They didn't catch the end of Superman's sentence because they were sucked into the whirlwind.

It didn't open at the other end. Metron and Darkseid were warring, somewhere, in some ghastly barren dimension. So for now, they were trapped inside the boom tube.

"Can you believe that?" Diana said, to Clark, maybe just to pass the time. "You and I."

"It was strange, all right," Bruce said. He and Diana glared at each other.

"They seemed to enjoy each other's company." Diana crossed her arms.

"I enjoy your company." Bruce tried to push his hand through the wall of the vortex, as if transdimensional god-creatures could really be thwarted as simply as that. "Stop pouting about it."

"What did you say?" she snapped.

Clark pinched the bridge of his nose.

Bruce seemed to ascertain that this was not a good line to cross, because he didn't say anything further. But he didn't apologize either, and a dangerous red rose in Diana's cheeks. Clark stepped back from the line of fire.

"I put up with a lot from you," she said. "I don't say anything when your idea of a date is smashing up the Riddler's latest mummy-stealing scheme, or when you call off at the last minute because you can't take a three hour break."

"That's how I work, Diana!" Bruce was bordering on shouting. "Go find some who isn't a JL member to have your cutesy dates with."

"Clark, you somehow manage to take Lois out, right? Even though you're oh-so-busy saving the world?" Diana leaned closer to him and Bruce's hand clenched.

Clark scooted away. "I don't think I want to join this conversation."

"He's right." Bruce crossed his arms. "We should talk about this later."

"When you're not busy?" Diana asked.

"I—"

"Right, Bruce." Diana turned away from him, just as the portal split open. Clark groaned. This would have to wait until later to be fixed.

They tumbled out into something sick green and marsh-mushy. Bruce was up to his ankles in algae sludge. The air tasted sour and acrid, and he wondered if he should even be able to breathe here.

They stood up and saw miles upon miles of flat, watery wasteland.


	15. Salvations

A/N: Anyone who was a fan of _Battlestar Galactica_ can probably see where I got the inspiration for the tunnel system. I love creepiness.

~Chapter Fourteen~

The sky was the color green of the sickly crayon that gets left in the box. Acid yellow clouds drifted across the sky. The air was humid, heavy and still. They'd been here barely ten minutes and Bruce was already sweating though his shirt.

There were no trees for shade, no flora at all except for the algae bogs and thin wisps of kelp growing in the foot-deep puddles.

They kept slogging through. For miles in front of them, all there was flat swamp. Whatever they were supposed to find here, Bruce had no idea how he was to find it.

Clark slicked his hair back and pulled his foot out of squelching mud.

"God," Diana said, green muck splattered all across her clothes. "God, this sucks."

"We'll find something soon," Clark replied, in his eternal optimism. Right now, it was making Bruce want to slug him. "I'm sure we wouldn't have been set down here if there wasn't a purpose."

Bruce paused for a second, to catch his breath in the heat, and when he tried to take another step his feet refused to be pulled from the mud. He tried again. "I'm stuck."

"What?" Clark grabbed his arm to give him a hand, but Bruce slipped _down_ out of his grasp. And vanished into a hole in the swamp.

Clark and Diana barely glanced at each other, before they two were sucked through the swamp water into the caverns below.

Bruce opened his eyes to utter darkness. He was hanging upside down, restrained at his feet, hands, and neck. Cool air wafted from somewhere. His eyes adjusted and he made out to other forms at either side of him.

"Bruce?" Clark asked.

"Yeah." He tried to wriggle his hands out of the ties, in case they'd be stupid enough to tie him too loosely. No—it'd be harder than that.

"I'm here too," Diana said. "Where are we?"

Bruce struggled. The wall he was tied up against was…squishy and warm. Like the porous inside of a lung. A slick and sticky liquid oozed on his cheek.

The lighting brightened, so it could be described as "dim" instead of "nonexistent."

Bitter mist hung in the cool air. A creature emerged, pale cream with pulsing purple veins and translucent skin, like an aborted thing. It touched Bruce and made a clicking sound with its mouth full of tiny sharp teeth. More clicks answered in the mist, and then the thing retreated.

"What was that?" Clark asked, a tinge of horror in his voice.

"Evolution," Bruce replied. Its breath had smelled like a Chinatown fish market in midday sun. "Gone radically different from our world. Can you break out?"

Clark shook his head. "That glow—I think it's some variation on yellow kryptonite. It doesn't hurt like green but I haven't got my powers. Do you know how long we were out?"

"The hourglass says we have…" Diana started. "We've only got two hours!"

Two hours, a group of crazy malformed monsters holding them captive, and not the slightest idea where the crystal might be. They didn't need luck. They needed divine intervention.

Something—or someone—groaned. Not the odd noises that the things made, but a sound very nearly human.

"Hello?" Diana called. The mist thinned and Bruce saw the hazy outline of a something that looked like a man.

"Hello?" the man echoed.

"Who are you?" she asked. Bruce stretched his fingers and could almost touch his belt.

"Are you a person?" The voice was uncertain, cracked and squeaky from disuse.

"There's three of us."

Bruce managed to open the pouch on his belt that held his pen laser. The aluminum tube slipped into his hand. The bonds were organic, like tendons almost, and he didn't know how well they would burn.

The red light cut through the meat with a satisfying sizzle. Now his right hand was free. He cut away at the three other bonds until the one holding his right ankle tight finally gave and he hit the spongy ground with a wet smack.

"We'll help you in a moment," Diana said to the stranger. "Don't worry."

"Don't tell him that!" Bruce hissed. "What if he's dangerous? Or one of those things trying to manipulate us?"

"Oh, shut up Bruce." Diana rubbed her newly-freed wrists. "He's tied up and doesn't look a bit like those things. Maybe he's a dimensional traveler, like us."

"Because there's _tons_ of those," Bruce muttered. Clark elbowed him in the ribs.

Diana walked into the mist, her anger driving her away from them. The man was thin, chained Christ-like, his beard scraggly and unkempt. When she stopped him front of his their eyes met and she stumbled backward.

"Diana?" he said, through a split lip and muscles weakened by yellow sun deprivation. "No. No. I _saw_ you. You died."

"Cut him down." Diana grabbed Bruce by the arm, roughly enough for it to hurt. When he didn't react fast enough she took the laser from his hands and sawed through the bonds.

Superman fell to the ground, weak. His eyes ran like honey over Diana.

"You're different." He said, getting to his feet with shaking knees. "You'd have a scar, at least."

A bit of suspicion like a rogue horsefly landed in Clark's head.

"We have to get out." Superman said. "They have dimensional ships, we can steal one. But if—if they catch us…they have these guns that will send each of your atoms to a separate pocket universe."

"And bombs like that, too, right?" Bruce caught on as well. "And they dropped one on Iowa, and you're trapped here because you sacrificed yourself to end the war."

"How…" Superman grabbed Bruce by the shoulders. "Have you been to my universe? What's happened? My god, I've been stuck here two months at least."

"Four years have passed there," Diana told him, quietly.

Superman turned to her, eyes wide with surprise and pain. His hands slipped from Bruce's jacket. When he first tried to speak nothing came. "They all must think I'm dead. Ma, Pa, Lois, the rest of the JL…please, are they all alright?"

"Everyone's dead." Bruce shrugged like this was meaningless and turned so he was looking anywhere but at them.

"Not everyone." Diana gave him a hard glare. "Lois is alive. We didn't ask about your parents. Your Batman is okay, too." She didn't explain _okay_.

"The rest of the League?" Superman asked, painfully, like he didn't want to know the answer but had to.

Diana shook her head. "I'm sorry."

Superman bit his lip. His eyes watered for a moment but he swallowed and shook it off. _He already suspected_, Bruce thought. "All right. It's okay. I have to get back—and you want out of here too, I think."

"First you have to help us." Bruce held up the crystal. Thank god, they could focus on this instead of that world. "Have you seen one of these?"

Superman barely ad to glance at it before nodding. "They use one of those to power the generators."

"Good." Bruce slipped the crystal back into his pocket. "If they centralize everything then the generators should be near the ships. We get the crystal, steal a ship, and you go back to your world while we finish our mission."

Superman nodded, and pointed left into the mist. "They always came from that way, and went back that way."

"Good." Bruce pulled two batarangs from his belt and they went together down the hall. It was curved, as if they were inside a body, walking through some unnamed god's still lungs. The floor made noises like bad kisses whenever they took a step.

There was a light at the end of the thin tunnel.

Clark went first, back against the wall, acutely aware of the fact that ordinarily he'd jump in and freeze half of them with a quick burst of wind. The tunnel opened to the brain of the complex—there were at least a dozen of the creatures huddling at machines. All had thin guns strapped around their torsos. Two doors on the far right side looked like they led to a hanger bay.

The crystal was held in a glass tube at the center of the room, protected by the double-thick cylinder and a mess of wires that drew off its radiation for power.

Bruce, from behind him, leaned in to look over his shoulder and his eyebrows wrinkled. It was the most concern he ever showed, and Clark felt a brief flicker of fear before knocking it away. They'd had worse odds than this before.

Beside him, Bruce calculated the odds. They had one human, an amazon, a handful of weapons and two depowered Kryptonians. The opposition had at least twelve, the home court advantage, weapons that made even him pause, and whatever else was held in the other tunnels leading away from central command.

He did the math twice in his head, and still didn't like it.

One of the creatures turned its head sharply, its black pupils dilating until they took up its entire eye. It unleashed a screeching, hacking sound that couldn't be anything other than an alarm.

"Go!" Diana ran forward, into the coming rush of alien bodies, and all hell broke loose.


	16. Transdimensional Forces

~Chapter Fifteen~

Diana rushed a horde of the monsters, unleashing a battle cry as she knocked four of them into a wall. Clark was working his way towards the crystal. There were so many of them—every time he got one down two more emerged from a hallway to take its place.

Bruce and Superman were by the hanger doors. Bruce was trying to the lid off what looked like a control panel with one of his batarangs. "Have you ever seen one of their planes being flown?"

"Twice," Superman said.

"Good. You get to fly it, then." Bruce smashed his fist through the nerve-like wiring behind the skeletal panel. The lock on the doors clicked open. Together they pried the doors apart.

Clark threw one of the monsters against the generator. Its arm went through the forcefield. Something exploded. Clark was tossed backward against a wall. The wind was knocked from his lungs. Two of the things took the opportunity to kick him in the face.

The crystal fell from the shattered generator and clattered to the floor amidst the fray.

Bruce showed Superman into the hanger. "Get a ship. Now." He dove for the crystal, grabbed it off the floor and narrowly missed a shot from one of the things' chilling guns. From the hanger he heard the whir of a ship starting up.

Diana screamed. One of the things had sunk its filed teeth into her shoulder. Clark was one the ground, blood pouring from his nose. Two of the monsters pull him up by his hair.

Superman appeared at the hanger door. "I've got one of the ships up!"

He saw what was happening and ran for Diana, tearing the milk-white mouth from her arm. She grabbed her shoulder and her knees went weak for a second. Superman shoved her towards the hanger. "Get in there!"

Bruce stowed the crystal in his jacket pocket and dashed over to Clark, taking out three enemies with a roundhouse kick. Clark staggered and touched his broken nose gingerly. "Ow! Damn that hurts!"

Bruce rolled his eyes at his formerly invulnerable friend and pointed him towards the ship.

"There's more!" Diana shouted. She was in the ship, tying to get its computer started up. Clark and Bruce leapt onto the gangway and onto the deck of the ship with Superman close behind. A battalion of monsters, thirty at least, were only a few yards behind. "We're not going to make it!"

"Go!" Bruce turned to see that Superman had stopped and gone back to fend off the army.

Diana checked her hourglass. "We've got two minutes."

Bruce was frozen on the gangway. Two minutes or they would fail and their entire universe would cease to exist. But he couldn't get the sight of vodka bottles out of his mind.

He ran back down to the floor and grabbed Superman, dragging him back towards the ship.

"What are you doing?" Superman exclaimed. "They're going to get here before you can take off!"

"You are not allowed to do this twice. You're going back." They fought their way back to the gangway. Bruce was the picture of determination. "You're going to go back because that will make things better."

Superman looked at him, confused, but they tumbled into the ship and Diana slammed the door shut behind them. Claws scraped against the hull. Something snapped at the back of the ship. Bruce hoped it wasn't something important.

The computer chimed. Diana punched the first button she could reach and it felt ie they were being turned inside out.

"Where are we?" Clark asked, when he'd gotten ahold of himself again. These ships were not built for human physiology. Bruce looked almost green.

Diana pulled herself off the floor and looked out the windshield. All they saw was swirls of color. "I think we're outside dimensional space. Look—my hourglass has stopped."

Superman stood up and took the controls. "Have you got what you need?"

Diana nodded. Bruce took the crystal from his pocket and Clark took the main one from his.

"Good." Superman touched a pad on the control panel. On the screen a blue earth appeared, labeled in an alien language. "Now I have to get home. I've been gone much too long."

Bruce and Clark activated the crystals.

* * *

><p>Bruce was sitting on the counter in the empty kitchen of his empty house, pouring vodka down the sink. On TV they were playing the yearly memorial broadcast for all the victims of the War. Usually he'd be blackout drunk at this point. This year he'd uncapped the bottle and found he couldn't do it.<p>

The doorbell rang.

Bruce stopped. Three and a half years without a single visitor and now twice in one week?

He threw open the door and found Clark on the doorstep.

"I'm not the other one," Clark said, hurriedly and excited. "The aliens captured me when I came through with the bomb but the other guys stopped there and rescued me."

Bruce stared at him. He couldn't breathe.

"Bruce?" Clark's eyes softened. "Hey, it's all right. I came back. For real."

Bruce practically fell into his arms.

* * *

><p>Diana opened her eyes and blinked twice, convinced she'd hit her head somewhere along the way. Everything was so…vividly colored.<p>

"Not another swamp," Bruce muttered. It looked like they were in the Florida mangroves.

Clark punched a tree and watched it fall. "I got my powers back!"

"Good for you, now let's—"

Bruce was interrupted by a shout from above and a man swooping down from the sky. "Halt, evil doppelgangers!"

"What on earth?" Diana was knocked down by a woman who looked just like her, but with a stylized eagle on her bodice.

"Wait!" Clark held up his hands. "Wait! We're not evil…whatevers. We're from a different dimension! We need your help."

"Oh!" Wonder Woman promptly dropped Diana. "Well why didn't you just say so? Please accept my apologies, friends."

The other Superman gestured to the assembled heroes: himself, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, a smiling Batman, Robin, and a pair of kids who were apparently just hanging around. "Allow us to introduce ourselves: we are the Superfriends!"

"You have got to be kidding me," Bruce said.


	17. Holy Hijinks, Batman!

A/N: Thanks to Fear the Struggle Bus for the dialogue ideas. And yes, I know that the Joker wasn't in the original Legion of Doom, but I wanted him so I used him.

~Chapter Sixteen~

"So you just happened to show up in the middle of the Floridian swamp?" Bruce asked, while keeping a cautious eye on the water for alligators. "Seems convenient."

"Oh, no." Superman smiled brightly. Even Clark had to admit it was the slightest bit annoying. "This is where the Legion of Doom is headquartered. They recently stole one of Britain's crown jewels, and so we're on our way to get it back. Care to join us?"

"Wait, they only stole the one piece?" Bruce wondered why they were even bothering. Surely there were more important things to deal with.

"And they gave a poor granny a nasty knock on the head as well," Batman said.

"Holy hijinks, Batman!" Robin added helpfully.

Bruce blinked, and then decided to let it pass by uncommented-upon. "Sure. Whatever. We'll help you get the jewel back if you help us retrieve what you need."

"Sounds fair!" Aquaman said, and started tramping off through the swamp. Clark, Bruce, and Diana shrugged and followed. They walked for awhile, the Superfriends traipsing on ahead (darkly, Bruce half-expected them to burst into song).

Then they stopped short at the sight of a huge purple dome with a stylized skull on the front.

"This is…obtuse," Diana said.

"Quite." Wonder Woman was hovering in mid-air, attack stance, lasso in hand. "The excesses of villainous souls."

"Everyone ready?" Batman asked.

Clark leaned over to Bruce. "Wow! I didn't know you were physically capable of that!"

"Of what." Bruce was honestly exasperated, and they'd only been here half an hour tops. This world made his skin crawl.

"Smiling," Clark said. "You know, like a normal person."

Bruce's scowl deepened. "Oh, shut up, Kent."

"Maybe you just need practice." Clark poked him. Bruce resisted the urge to push him into the mud, but only because Superman was about to knock the door down. "_He_ seems pretty good at it. Maybe it'd sweeten your disposition, and make Diana a little happier in the bargain?"

"Diana needs to leave me be." Bruce crossed his arms just as Superman knocked the door in and bellowed, "Legion of Doom! We know you're inside! Surrender the tiara."

"Never!" From the mists inside of the insidious headquarters, three figures emerged: Lex Luthor, the Joker, and Black Manta. "The gems in this tiara will finance our evil schemes for years to come!"

"Superfriends! Let's get that tiara!" Everyone, including the two random kids and their stupid-looking dog, leapt into action. The Joker cackled and tossed a canister of something into their ranks.

Bruce took a breath of the white gas and his mind spun. What was it—Joker venom? Knockout gas? His nose twitched. "_Achoo!_"

"Sneezing gas," Superman exclaimed. "Devious."

"You think—_achoo_—sneezing gas is devious?" Bruce wiped his nose on his sleeve. "Annoying, maybe, but devious?"

Batman looked at him, almost startled. "Why? What do _your_ villains do?"

Bruce just shook his head and punched Lex Luthor in the face. Ah, catharsis. Robin darted past, giggling with a batarang in his hand. Bruce paused momentarily at the spectacle, which allowed Luthor to kick him in the knee and scamper away. Bruce groaned at the pain. "Ah, fuck."

Batman gaped at him and smacked his hands over Robin's ears. "Language, sir! There are children here."

"Good lord." Bruce rubbed his temples. "I am so sick of dimension hopping."

Clark had to choke back a laugh. Bruce stalked past him, grabbed the spear gun out of Black Manta's hands, and smashed the man against the wall three times. Black Manta dropped the extra spear he'd been holding. Bruce glared at him and growled into his face, "You _will_ tell us where the tiara is. Now."

Manta swallowed. "I…I…yessir."

Bruce clamped a hand on his shoulder. "Let's go get it."

Manta led him to a storeroom at the back of the base and opened the door. The tiara sat shimmering on a velvet box. And the center gem was the very crystal they had been looking for. Bruce turned to Manta, punched him once in the face to knock him out,and took the tiara. When he reentered the still-smoky hallway. Batman had Joker tied up and the two Supermen were stripping Luthor of his kryptonite-powered weapons.

"I've got it." He held the tiara up.

"That's the crystal we need!" Clark said.

The two groups of superheroes looked at each other. Superman shifted from foot to foot. "We need to return that to the Queen. It is, after all, her tiara."

Batman examined it. "I'm sure I could make a fake ruby to go in place of the crystal."

Clark popped the gem from its setting. "Won't make much of a difference in the Queen's wealth, now will it? Thanks for your help. It's been...interesting to meet you all."

Bruce and Clark put the crystals together. The cube was nearly complete. As the vortex opened Robin shouted, "Holy dimensional portal, Batman!"

"All right," Clark said, when they were inside the vortex. "There was something wrong with that kid."

"There was something wrong with that whole universe." Bruce waited for the other portal to open. Great. Almost at the last crystal and they were stuck. "I mean, they called themselves the Superfriends. And they had Aquaman on their team but no Green Lantern."

"Don't be mean to Aquaman," Clark said, mildly.

"Why shouldn't I?" He tossed the crystal cube from hand to hand. "He's only useful if you're underwater. Otherwise he's just moderately strong and semi-invulnerable. And the whole talking to fish thing is kind of dumb."

Clark snorted at that. Bruce yawned.

"Don't tell me you're tired now." Clark tilted his head.

"I'm human and we've slept once during this whole endeavor." The portal still wasn't opening. Bruce and Clark sat down on the floor of the vortex. It was kind of like sitting on ice—smooth and cool. "Unless you count alien-induced unconsciousness as sleep, which I certainly don't. So yeah, I'm tired."

Diana shook her head at them. "Boys."

"Someone else needs a nap, too." Bruce inclined his head towards her. "Cranky, princess?"

She gave him a hard, warning smile. "Just ready to get the last crystal and go home." They glared at each other.

Clark sighed. "Come on, guys. Save it for when we're home."

The portal opened with a shudder and flashes of electricity. Metron was weakening. Clark leapt out, followed by Diana and Bruce before the portal closed with a thunderclap. Diana brushed herself off and looked up at the building before them. "Well, I think this is a pretty good clue as to what we're supposed to do."

Wayne Manor (a perfectly normal-looking Wayne Manor, Bruce was glad to see) stood in all its opulent glory.

"What do we do?" Clark asked. "Just go knock on the door?"

"What if I'm a girl again?" Bruce said. "Somehow I don't think hitting on me would get us the information we need."

Clark turned red. "Fin. How would someone get into _your_ house?"

Bruce thought.

*****#*****

Clark knocked on the door. He had a notebook and pencil in his hand, while Diana carried a camera. Bruce was wearing a baseball cap, low enough to cover all his hair, and sunglasses. It was a poor disguise, but all they'd been able to whip up with thirty minutes and fifty dollars.

The door swung open. Alfred stood on the other side. "Good afternoon—may I help you?"

"Um," Clark said. Bruce kicked him. "We're here from _The Architectural Digest_. We're here to get an interview about the house."

"Ah. Right this way. I must have forgotten the appointment." Alfred let them inside and showed them to the parlor. "I will tell Mr. and Mrs. Wayne that you're here."

"_Mrs_. Wayne?" Diana hissed, when he'd left. Bruce gave him a look. Clark rolled his eyes and scanned the parlor. Everything was nearly the same. Same portrait over the fireplace. Same gloomy atmosphere rom the drapes and paint. But something was slightly off.

Alfred reappeared at the doorway. "Sirs and ma'am, here are the Waynes."

Two figures appeared in the doorway. Clark squinted—the silhouettes didn't look like Bruce and a girl. Beside him, he heard Bruce take a sharp breath and lean back.

"Hello," said Martha Wayne, smiling at them kindly. "We weren't expecting you."

"Oh, um, the publicist must have gotten some wires crossed." Clark recovered quickest. "Do you mind us asking you a few questions about the house?"

"No, not at all." Martha and Thomas sat on the opposite sofa. Clark glanced at Bruce and sent up his thanks that his eyes were hidden behind the sunglasses. "Alfred, would you be a dear and get some of the cookies I baked? And you all, you are…?"

"I'm Clark," he said, pointing to himself.

"Diana," she said.

Everyone looked expectantly at Bruce. He blinked and stuttered. "I'm…ah…"

"This is Alan." Clark clapped him on the back. "It's his first interview—you'll have to forgive him." Bruce nodded, grateful.

Alfred returned with the cookies. All three took one. Clark and Diana both munched on theirs. Bruce held his for a minute, and then took a cautious bite before setting the cookie down on the table and swallowing hard.

"Say—I think I met you before." Thomas pointed to Clark. "Clark Kent, right? But didn't you work for the Daily Planet?"

Clark paused. "I…I moonlight. Not much money in journalism, these days, you know!" He smiled brightly. Jesus, this was hard.

Thomas nodded. "This house has a lot of history. What did you want to know about it?"

"The architect?" Diana asked. "Who was he?"

"It's an Olmstead house, done in the middle of his career." Martha leaned forward. She obviously enjoyed this. "There was a Wayne Manor previously, but Thomas's ancestors decided they'd wanted something more modern. For 1870, of course. Later generations tacked on additions, and broke up or put together rooms, and put on the art deco touches."

"It's beautiful," Diana said. "Do you mind giving us a little tour? For pictures?"

Martha smiled stood up. "I'd love to."

They went through the hallways, the kitchen (marble and stainless steel—Diana couldn't help but admire it), and the family room. They wen up the carved mahogany staircase and Martha led them through the bedrooms. At the last door she paused for a minute, but finally shook her head to herself and pushed it open.

"This was my son's room," she said, and stayed by the door. They stepped inside, and Diana took a few requisite photos of the canopy bed and the window seat. IT was the perfect boy bedroom. A bookshelf full of adventure stories, a painted toy chest, and a pirate mural along the wall. Clark noted with a bit of irony the Zorro posters tacked up on the wall.

Bruce walked up to the bookshelf and pulled it back, revealing a little playhouse with a light and a stack of toys. "That's a nice touch."

Martha was frozen, her hand on the doorknob, staring at him. Bruce looked up and instantly knew he'd made a mistake. She touched the bookshelf. "How did you know about this? We've never mentioned it before. I…I haven't even thought about it for years. How on earth did you know it was here?"


	18. The Final Crusade

~Chapter Seventeen~

Thomas and Martha were looking at them stony-faced over the kitchen table. Thomas put his hand over Martha's and leaned forward. "I should toss you all out right now. You expect us to believe this?"

"We know it sounds crazy," Clark said. "But we are telling you the truth. I'm sure your Justice League had been through its share of insane stuff too.

"So you decided to come here for what?" Martha asked. She hadn't taken her eyes off Bruce since they'd been forced to tell the Waynes exactly who they were.

Bruce shrugged, his eyes on the table. "We were hoping to find _me_ actually. In most universes I have the equipment to scan for the crystal's energy signature. But we had to make sure that a version of me actually existed here.

"One doesn't," Thomas said. "Our son…passed away a very long time ago."

Bruce had his arms crossed. He didn't comment on Thomas's remark, just pulled the crystal cube from the pocket. "Does this look familiar at all?"

Thomas held out his hand. Bruce gave him the crystal. Thomas took a deep breath, turned the crystal over and over. "It does feel like I've seen this before. The museum opening, remember, Martha?"

"Oh, yes." She took it from him, and rubbed the glassy edges. "It was in the geological exhibit."

"We have to get that crystal," Diana said, after Martha had handed the cube back to her. Bruce nearly jumped out of his seat. Clark and Diana both thanked the Waynes before getting up. It was eleven a.m. on a Sunday—if they hurried they could sneak in and grab the rock before the museum opened.

Martha walked them to the door. Bruce was the last one out. Before he left she smiled sadly and said, "Thank you for coming. I…I can almost see how _he_ might have been. Goodness—even in the JL."

He shook his head. "Don't. He got shot in a mugging, right?"

She nodded.

He opened the door and turned away from her. "In my world, that was when you both died."

*****#*****

They got into the museum fairly easily. It was nearly identical to the Museum of Natural History in their Gotham, and Bruce had had to break into that one a few times before. It wasn't long before they gotten past the cameras, disabled the motion detectors, and found themselves in the geological exhibit.

"There it is," Clark whispered, gesturing across the room. The crystal sat behind a glass panel, quite egregiously mislabeled as quartz. Bruce stepped out from the hallway, preparing to unseal the glass and take it, when the wall next to them exploded.

Bruce was thrown onto the ground, dust in his eyes and mouth. Clark leapt to the side, his glasses missing, just in time to get hit with a burst of green energy. Diana fought the shockwave and stood up, finding herself face-to-face with a thirteen-foot-tall man. He had hands the size of bowling balls and before she could move he tried to put one through her skull.

Bruce got to his feet and spat out a mouthful of plaster dust. Through the blown-out wall came four more figures—three men like the jacked-up monster Diana was currently wrestling, and a woman holding a smoking energy rifle.

"Well," the woman said. "So the Kryptonian and the Amazon showed up. And a third one, too? Brilliant."

Bruce looked at her, squinting through the smoke and the choking dust. "Talia?"

He barely got the word out before one of the mutants leapt on him.

******#******

Clark could feel his energy draining out. What had she hit him with—some kind of weaponized kryptonite? God, he hated alternate dimensions. But he didn't need powers to fight. Diana was holding her own against one of the mutant men (Clark saw their muscles and wondered if they were on Venom) but two had ganged up on Bruce and the fourth was going for the crystal they needed.

"No you don't," Clark muttered, and jumped onto the man's back. They tumbled to the ground. The man's giant hands wrapped around Clark's neck. Clark kicked him in the stomach. The man just laughed. Lights flashed through Clark's vision.

High heels on the concrete floor. The woman (he recognized her—god, Talia al Ghul? Really?) walked past him choking in her henchman's hands, shattered the glass with one leather-gloved fist and took the crystal.

"No!" Diana punched her opponent in the jaw, sending him crashing to the floor. She flew across the room, ready to snatch the crystal back from Talia. But Talia just smiled, touched another button on the energy rifle, and shot Diana with a burst of golden light.

Diana smashed into the floor, screaming. Every nerve in her body was on fire. Talia just shook her head, like she was talking to a naughty child. "You didn't expect me to come unprepared, did you? This was a little gift from Ares."

Clark closed his eyes and used the last of his strength to punch upward as hard as he could. Blood from the goon's smashed nose rained down on his head. He hit the ground.

Behind them, the henchmen had gotten the upper hand on Bruce. The one had Bruce's arm wrenched behind his back while the other had him in a chokehold. Just as Clark was about to reach Talia he heard the sickening crack of one of the goons pulling Bruce's arm out of the socket.

He spun around. "Bruce!"

"I'm alright! Get the crystal!" Bruce flipped over, catching the mutant in the face with his boot. The other one fell back.

But the pause cost them. Talia had the crystal firmly in her grasp. "I'm tired of playing with you."

Clark tried to move but he wasn't fast enough. Talia unloaded enough kryptonite energy into him to make him scream. Diana was still on the ground. Bruce jumped towards him but the second henchmen recovered, grabbed him by his dislocated shoulder and yanked him up into the air.

Talia dropped the energy rifle and pulled a simple black pistol from a holster at her hip. She leveled it at Bruce, who was still struggling against the henchman's chokehold. "Nothing personal. But you're in my way."

And she pulled the trigger twice.


	19. Home

~Chapter Eighteen~

_Everything hurt. He was lying on his back with voices around him and blood cooling on his skin and he didn't know where he was._

_Cold, sharp metal against his skin. He tried to move, to pull way, but someone was holding him down._

_Voices._

_Clark, is he—_

_Hold him still. The bullets—_

_Oh, Thomas—_

_And then he slipped away again._

*****#******

Someone had pulled covers over him. He was somewhere between sleep and semi-wakefulness. Footsteps echoed in the room. The person touched his shoulder.

"Hey," Clark said, almost in a whisper. "We found Talia. In Nepal. Diana and I will go get the crystal—this Superman found us and offered to help."

Talia. Bits and pieces were coming back. He needed to get up.

"No, you don't." Clark pressed the covers down on him. "Sleep."

Bruce was already drifting off.

*****#*****

The last thing he remembered was the barrel of a pistol.

Morning light streamed through the window, warm enough that he didn't need to open his eyes to feel it. Someone was sitting near him. He could hear the breathing. His mouth tasted like morphine.

If he was lying on his back that meant he was probably in the medbay. And there were only two people who'd be with him then—Clark or Diana. The last time he'd woken up on painkillers with Clark next to him was when he'd broken both ankles after an ill-advised jump. The only thing worse than being on crutches was being on crutches with Clark trying to get him into a wheelchair.

That was not Clark's breathing. Or Diana's. His eyes opened. A woman was sitting on the edge of the bed. He tried to move and pain sliced across his body. His shirt was gone and there were bandages wrapped around his chest, his left arm in a sling.

All he had were bits and pieces, but he knew when the painkillers wore off it would hurt a lot worse than this.

"Rest," the woman said. His vision was still blurry. She held out a glass of water to him. In that instant, the fog lifted and he knew exactly where she was. Martha smiled, but when her eyes passed over the scars across his skin it faltered. "Thomas got the bullets out, but you lost quite a bit of blood. And that shoulder. Looks like you've been through worse, though."

Bruce shrugged, and sipped the water. The post-painkiller pounding in the back of his head started up. "I don't have powers. It comes with the job."

"Your friends went to Nepal," she said, and took the empty glass from him. "And your fa—Thomas is at the hospital."

He sat up despite the fact that it felt like getting stabbed in the side and rubbed his temples. "Ah—that was stupid. We should have been able to get it."

"From what I heard you were outnumbered and unprepared." Martha touched his hand, almost motherly. He jerked. She pulled back like she was hurt and he felt a pang of irrational guilt.

Martha stood up. Bruce detected the scent of chocolate chip cookies wafting up from the kitchen. "I've been baking—how about I bring up some milk and cookies?"

Bruce stared at her. Cookies from his mother for gunshot wounds. Scratch the whole cross-dimension thing—this had to be a hallucination. "I'll come downstairs Clark and Diana should be back soon anyway."

Martha raised a skeptical eyebrow but to her credit didn't try to stop him.

He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and stood. He tried to take a step and his knees went weak. Martha grabbed his arm and he didn't even much care because he was concentrating on not breathing too deeply. The bullet must have broken a rib. His head buzzed.

Martha sighed and patted him on the back. Together they managed the stairs. "Do you remember falling out of the oak tree when you were five? Sprained your ankle but wouldn't let Thomas carry you back to the house?"

Bruce smiled ruefully. "Yeah."

"Well I told Thomas you'd outgrow the willfulness." They reached the family room. Martha pointed to the sofa. "Now sit down, or else I'll have to use that phone number your friends gave me.

He almost told her that there was very little Clark and Diana could threaten him with, but he did hurt and it was easy enough to just do as she asked.

*****#*****

Clark and Diana returned a while later, exhausted and covered in black ash and soot. It had been a battle, but they had the crystal.

They let themselves into Wayne Manor. Clark scanned the upstairs but Bruce wasn't in the bedroom. He probably shouldn't have been surprised, but only a handful of hours ago Thomas Wayne had been pulling bullets from his son's body. But apparently even that wasn't enough to persuade Bruce to stay passed out from blood loss for more than a few hours.

They walked into the family room and stopped. A crazy sight stood before them. Mrs. Wayne was sitting on one end of the L-shaped couch, knitting. And Bruce was stretched out on the other end, munching on a plate of cookies with a blanket over his lap. He'd even kept the sling on.

Martha saw them in the doorway and jumped up. "Oh! Did you get it?"

"Yeah." Clark held up the crystal. He felt like he could barely keep his eyes open. Damn kryptonite.

Bruce looked at them. "Are we going back now?"

"Darkseid's going to be waiting," Diana said. She was covered in dirt and grime. "We're going to have to fight him before we can set the device off."

"How much longer do you have here?" Martha asked.

Diana checked the hourglass. "Around nine hours."

"Then you have enough time to get cleaned up and have a meal." She very kindly shooed them off of her clean floor. "Go wash up. I'll be making dinner soon."

*****#******

After Clark had taken a shower and had had new clothes thrust at him by Mrs. Wayne, he went and found Bruce sitting on the porch swing. He sat down next to him.

"Your mom is nice," he said.

"Yeah." Bruce was holding a mug of what looked like homemade hot chocolate. It seemed like every few minutes Martha was handing him something else.

"Almost makes you think about staying." Clark leaned back and gave Bruce a pointed look. Bruce set down the mug and didn't meet Clark's eyes.

"I'm not—"

"Please. You really can't lie to me at this point Bruce, I know you too well," Clark said. "Now come on, talk to me."

Bruce stared down into his cup. "I just…I don't know. I never wanted this. Being Batman, going out every night and fighting these, these _crazy_ people—when I was a kid, I wanted to be a doctor like my dad. I wanted to live in this house and have the wife and the two-point-five kids. I didn't want the superheroics, Clark."

He sighed. "This just made me think about how things might have been different."

"You still saw them die." Clark put his hand on Bruce's shoulder. "Even if you stay, you'll still be _you_. If you stayed, do you think you could just sit still when you hear about the next murder, the next armed robbery? How long do you think you would be able to stand it before you had to go back out again?"

"You're right," Bruce said, very very quietly. "But it's nice, you know? It's nice to…" He broke off and swallowed before finishing his sentence.

"It's these," he said, holding up one of the ever-present cookies. "Mom always made the best chocolate chip cookies. But she never wrote the recipe down. And these are perfect. I like it, okay? I like being taken care of. I like not being treated like _Batman_ by everyone. I just—I just want to be selfish for once."

Clark rocked the swing back and forth with his feet. "You're allowed that. You don't have to sacrifice everything on the altar of crime-fighting. Diana loves you, you know and you keep being an idiot and pushing her away."

Bruce nodded, but his good hand was still curled around the warm mug and all its promises of home.

"it's your decision," Clark said, getting up. "But everyone I know who's tried to build a life based on mutual tragedy has failed. And I'd miss you, for sure."

He went back into the house to let Bruce think.

*****#*****

Bruce was still sitting on the swing as the sun set. He had maybe an hour left. The hot chocolate had cooled in the cup but he didn't want to get up. For one, he hurt still and for another he didn't want to think about this right now.

Someone opened the door. Bruce looked over to see Martha standing on the porch. She slipped onto the swing next to him. "Did you like the lasagna? I wanted to—to see you all off with a nice meal."

"It was great." His shoulder started aching again, though maybe it was the stress. Impulsively, he said, "I don't want to go."

She put her arm around him. They sat in silence for a few minutes, letting the breeze rock the swing. Finally she pulled him close and ruffled his hair, like he was five, and to his own surprise he didn't mind.

"Sweetheart," she said, and it almost hurt. "After that night I would have given anything—_anything_—to see my little boy grow up. And I got to." She smiled at him, though it seemed at the point of breaking. "I would like nothing more than to keep you. But I know I can't. You have a family back home—not us, no, but your friends need you and so does Alfred. And Clark told me about your boys."

He nodded silently.

"You need to go back," she said. "If only to kick some godly-alien butt."

He smiled too, at that. But then he caught sight of his watch, and realized that he had less than half an hour here. The smile faded. "I know."

*****#*****

"You ready?" Diana asked. She and Clark were standing outside Wayne Manor, crystals in hand, ready to go fight Darkseid. "Is he coming?"

"I hope so," Clark said. Diana shot him an alarmed look.

But sure enough, Bruce stepped out the door, and gave the two of them a small smile. Martha Wayne stopped him and hugged him tight before Thomas clapped him on the back and they let him down the steps.

"All set?" Clark put the crystals together. Bruce raised his hand in one last wave before the vortex sucked them off to a war of hellfire and brimstone.


	20. At the End of the World

A/N: Well here it is everyone, the last chapter in my fanfic odyssey. I just wanted to thank everyone for reviewing, favoriting, and following this story. It's definitely the most involved fanfiction I've done and all the reviews were awesome motivation to keep writing.

If anyone is interested in reading more of my stuff, my other current project is a third set of 20 one-shots (More Plotbunnies).

~Chapter Nineteen~

It was like being trapped inside of a tornado. All Bruce could see was black and it felt like there was diamond dust blasting across his face, flaying off his skin. Someone grabbed his arm. He turned and could only just make out the glint of Diana's tiara and gauntlets through the dust and wind and darkness.

"Earth's mightiest heroes." Darkseid's laugh was a jackhammer to the skull. He was holding a bleeding, broken Metron by the neck and as they watched he tossed the unconscious New God into the storm. "You should have stayed in exile. I shall grind your bones into meal."

Bruce reached into his pocket and felt the smooth, slick edges of the cube. He had to get closer for it to take down Darkseid.

Darkseid swept out his arms and lightning cracked through the clouds down to the scorched earth. Boom tubes opened, tiny bursts of light hundreds of feet above their heads, and hordes of parademons rained down on them.

Clark took down two with a burst of heat vision. Bruce saw in a flash Darkseid's brilliance—no sunlight meant that Clark's powers had a time limit. Bruce ripped through two monsters with a pair of batarangs.

Something crunched under Bruce's feet. He looked down and saw bleached white bones. With the blackness and the storms he'd almost forgotten that this was Earth. He paused and it gave a parademon the chance to slash him across the face with a rock-hard first. A two-foot-tall cutlass rose above his head.

Clark swiped it out of the way. "Don't think you want to be out of action again, huh?"

Bruce rolled his eyes and leapt over the heads of six or seven soldiers, gaining maybe a yard or two of distance. "Save the jokes for after we defeat the interdimensional madman, _please_."

Clark almost laughed but he didn't have the chance. Sixteen parademons all leapt on him at once, like a hellborn football team. Bruce glanced back for just a second, but Clark could help himself. The machine needed to get to Darkseid.

He could feel it thrumming warm and alive in his pocket, like it knew where it needed to go. There was chaos all around. He'd completely lost track of where Diana was. His whole mouth and nose were filled with the stench of sulfuric acid, his eyes watering down his face.

Claws sliced through his clothes but the sting barely registered. So hard to breathe in the smoke. Diana was in front of him, green parademon blood splashed across her bodice. He tossed her the cube.

****#*****

Diana snatched the cube from midair. It was practically shaking with vibrations now, tiny blue cracks breaking through the crystal skin. A parademon reached for her but she didn't even give it a chance—just sliced right through it with a swing of her fist.

Darkseid saw her and his red eyes went dark. Something froze inside of her. She knew what those eyes could do—hit her with omega beams that would shoot her straight into an Apokoliptian torture chamber.

An image bore into her mind, not hers but a gloating sick desire: herself tied up, naked and beaten, upside down with a ball gag in her mouth.

"You digusting cretin," she whispered, becase she knew the god could hear her over the wind and the howls and the battle screams.

Clark flew up a little bit ahead of her, so close to Darkseid that they were just a hair's breath short of _there_.

She held the cube up while she dislocated a parademon's jaw, and he took it.

*****#*****

The cube was burning and shaking. The blue cracks had widened into ribbons of light that would blind you if you looked right at it.

Clark didn't care. He could feel the lack of sunlight bleeding away his powers, feel that he had maybe ten minutes left of the kind of strength that Darkseid could appreciate.

The parademons got thicker. He swerved to avoid bolt after bolt of hard, broiling omega beams. But all he needed to see was the black-burnt ground beneath him and the hot anger boiled up.

He threw the cube as hard as he could at the center of Darkseid's chest.

It was the only time he would ever hear a god scream.

*****#******

Bruce woke up to the phone ringing. There was sunlight streaming through the windows. He was lying on his back on the bed, fully clothed. His head felt like it was full of cotton balls. All he remembered was sulfur.

He picked up the phone.

"Did that really happen?" It was Clark, sounding slurred like he'd barely woken up. "It doesn't feel like a dream."

"Did Diana call?" Bruce hit the alarm. Five in the morning.

"Yeah. She said she woke up in her apartment. Everything here looks fine." Clark paused. "That _had _to have happened, right? No way our brains made up twelve different alternate universes as some sort of crazy dream. Because _my_ brain wouldn't want to make some of those up."

"Yeah." Bruce got up and looked out the window. The rolling greens and trees of the Wayne property spread out as far as he could see, just as they always had. But he knew he'd seen them black and decimated. "I think so. But I think the cube put it back."

"Are you sure?" Clark asked. "That we didn't just get hit with some sort of magical-dream-spell or something? It wouldn't be the first time."

Bruce felt something like a piece of paper crinkle in his pocket. He took it out and unfolded it to read the scrawling cursive.

"Bruce?" Clark asked, after a good minute of silence.

"It's real," Bruce said, and hung up the phone.

*****#*****

Alfred awoke to the sounds of pans clanging around in the kitchen. It was quite the bizarre sound—in fact, he couldn't remember the last time anyone but himself had actually cooked in the Wayne household. Equally bemused and concerned (who knew what a concussed superhero to get up to) he stepped downstairs.

Bruce was in the kitchen, mixing something in a glass bowl. Flour and butter and chocolate chips were smeared across the counter.

"Master Bruce?" Alfred asked carefully. If it had been Dick or Tim he might have shrugged the sight off, but this was certainly something to behold. "May I ask what you're doing?"

Bruce jumped and turned like he hadn't realized Alfred was there. He held up a piece of paper. "I…I found the recipe for Mom's cookies." He looked around him at the state of the kitchen and faltered. "Guess I made a bit of a mess."

Alfred smiled and took the recipe. "Well, sir, I'm certain there will be less mess if we finish them together."

"You don't think I can bake?" Bruce asked, with a sarcastic edge on it.

But he smiled too.


End file.
